


This is the Forest Primeval

by suchakidder



Series: Daemon AU [1]
Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Daemons, Canon compliant except that there's daemons, Canon-Typical Worms (The Magnus Archives), Daemon Separation, HDM AU, M/M, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Past Child Abuse, negative self-talk, which also means there's original characters for each person's daemon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-24
Updated: 2020-11-18
Packaged: 2021-03-07 21:48:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 27,595
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26624674
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/suchakidder/pseuds/suchakidder
Summary: You know the drill: its season 1, but with daemons. Starts directly after MAG 22 - Colony.
Relationships: Martin Blackwood/Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist
Series: Daemon AU [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2061879
Comments: 42
Kudos: 126





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> If you haven't read the His Dark Materials series by Phillip Pullman or seen the show on HBO, here's a little primer for you on [what a daemon is ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C3%A6mon_\(His_Dark_Materials\))
> 
> If you have read the series or seen the HBO show, please do not yell at me for inaccuracies, I haven't read any of the series, except for Belle Suavage in years so I'm playing hard and fast with the rules of daemons here. Also don't spoil The Secret Commonwealth for me.

It’s pure adrenaline like Martin’s never known that has him run like a madman through London, clutching a jar of parasitic worms to his chest. He’d traded his joggers for a pair of jeans and ran his wet fingers through his hair in a vain attempt to corral it after two weeks of sponge baths from his freezing tap, but that had been born out of a desire to kill time while he waited to see if Jane were really gone than a desire to look decent. He would have run through London, hair a mess and stockinged feet stuck into his dad’s ancient house slippers, wearing the same pair of joggers and multiple jumpers he hadn’t changed once in his sudden house arrest if he had known it was safe to do so.

It had still been nerve-wracking to open the door and test it, even after a few hours with nothing but silence from the other side of the door and not a whiff of that musty smell. But it had been two weeks and Evangeline was muttering about charging the door herself if Martin didn’t open it and she was large enough she might actually do damage. Martin gave them some tasks to take their minds off it-- he changed, Evangeline picked up whatever cans and food wrappers she could get in her mouth and tossed them into the bin. They left the clothes where they were, stuffed along the window seals and into any crack a worm could conceivable fit into, but together they had sorted through the mass of blankets on the bed that had been their solution to the lack of heating. Evangeline pawed and rooted through the lump, pulling out each extraneous blanket for Martin to fold, and when she was done she even did a messy job of making the bed, before turning to Martin with a look that threatened she’d make good on her promise if he didn’t stop stalling.

“All right, all right,” he’d said, crouching to look her in the eyes. She’d always been tall, even for a St. Bernard, but Martin’s tall too, so he’d had to fold nearly in half to get to her height. “If she’s not there, we bolt for it, alright?”

“We’ve only talked it out a million times,” Evangeline huffed in annoyance, but she’d nuzzled into Martin’s face anyway, before pulling back with a determined grin. “We bolt for it and we don’t stop until we get to the Institute.”

Martin had grabbed the jar where he’d confined the few worms that managed to access his apartment, steeled himself, and thrown open the door

They don’t even once they’d made it to the Institute. They’re both panting hard and Martin’s dimly aware of the pain in his sides at the exertion, but he finds it doesn’t bother him as much as he would think as he sprints through the atrium, past Rosie in reception and down to the basement stairwell. Once he’s at the Archives, he doesn’t even slow down to take note of who’s in the office or what they’re doing, he just barrels into Jon’s office with Evangeline at his side and sets down his hard-won evidence squarely on Jon’s desk.

And that’s when the adrenaline runs out and Martin can feel his body vibrating from the jitters of a multi-mile run after two weeks imprisoned in his apartment. He sits down heavily into the one rickety wooden chair opposite Jon’s desk at the same time Evangeline flops onto the floor with a big huff. 

“Martin, what the hell is going on? Why do you look so --” Jon thankfully doesn't finish that thought, though his face says it all. Martin knows no matter how much he worked at his hair or pulled on clean jeans, he’s still been inside for two weeks with no hot water and as he’d taken to wearing as multiple jumpers to stave off the cold, the one currently on top can only be described as the “cleanest” of the lot. Evangeline too, took some damage, her fur’s thinned and certainly has less luster than normal, but if anything it’s the manic look in her eyes that gives them away. 

Jon, as always, looks put together and austere, sharp eyes on him. Octavia is plainly in view for once. Martin tries not to look for her every time he enters Jon’s office, but he achieves that just as often as he achieves not watching Jon anytime they’re in the same room. Martin’s gotten good at finding the little nooks and crannies around the Archives she likes to hide and if he doesn’t find her, Evangeline will tell him where Octavia was later: she’s even more attuned to her than Martin is. But today, Octavia isn’t perched on top of the ancient urn on the top of the bookshelf or sat in the web strung between the light fixture and door frame, she’s on the desk, on top of the tape recording looking directly at Martin. It shocks him into action.

“It’s uh… the worms. From the statement?”

“With Harriet Lee?” Jon asks. He eyes the jar of squelching worms with skepticism. “I can see they’re similar to the description but --”

“I know, but I didn’t just randomly happen on them. She was there.”

“Harriet’s dead.”

“No Jane… Jane Prentiss.” Martin’s not sure she’s not dead as well, she couldn’t have been alive with what he saw. 

“That’s -- Are you sure?”

Martin’s been on the receiving end of Jon skepticism many times, but today he doesn’t seem judgmental--both he and Octavia are observing him with such an intensity he wants to look away, but he holds his ground. Evangeline sits up, to bring her eye level with Octavia. 

“I think I should give a statement.” Martin gestures towards the tape recorder, his hand still a meter or so away from it, but he’s hyper aware it’s the closest he's been to Octavia, who remains where she is, her eyes not even flicking to the hand pointed her way. Martin hopes the sudden frequency in Evangeline’s panting isn't too obvious to them.

“You think that’s necessary?” Jon asks evenly.

“Yeah, I think so.”

Octavia pushes down the record button with one of her legs.

“Martin, are you sure about this?” Jon asks. 

Martin nods and they begin. 

During their confinement, Martin and Evangline had practiced what he’s going to say countless times, but what comes out isn’t the polished, practiced version, but it’s not messy either. Sitting there across from Jon and Octavia, it’s easy to tell a concise, true account of all the events, of Martin’s eagerness to complete his research to Jon’s standards, the fear and terror at finding Jane, the bleak boredom of being stuck inside. Neither he nor Evangeline had found the right words to describe Jane’s cough, but giving the statement it had just flowed out of him naturally. 

Aside from the occasional prompt for Jon, Martin speaks most of the time. Martin had fully been prepared to tell the whole story, even the parts Evangline had seen, but she surprises him by clearing her throat when he gets to that part. 

“Are you sure?” he asks. When they first got to the apartment, exhausted and still in shock and terrified, it had been all she had been able to say, as if in a trance, but after that night, she would go still and tense every time Martin brought it up.

Evangeline softly butts her head Martin’s hand where it hangs loosely off the armrest, before pulling back with no fear or hesitation in her expression. 

“I was already a meter or two ahead of Martin, and when I saw that first worm fall… I inched forward even more. I don’t know why I did it, I could hear Martin scream and I knew he didn’t want me to… I didn’t even __want__ to, but suddenly I was moving and only a few paces away when she turned and…”

Martin buries his hand in the fur on the back of her neck, ready to take over if she needs it, but Evangeline takes a deep breath and continues.

“Her face wasn’t right; her eyes were messed up and her teeth were jagged and black but that wasn’t the worst part. I don’t know how, if this really was Jane Prentiss, I know she was human once, so I don’t know how this is possible, but… she didn’t have a daemon.”

Even after having this knowledge, Martin stills flinches, but he’s not the only one in the room; Octavia scuttles backwards off the tape recorder, only stopping when she feels the press of Jon’s hand against her, and for his part, Jon also looks stricken and distressed.

“That’s… Sometimes they can be small. People don’t always see Octavia at first,” Jon says without his usual disdain. Martin can tell he barely believes himself. 

“I was further away, but I didn’t… She didn’t have a daemon, Jon. I think the worms got to it, like they had got to Jane, but I don’t think her daemon survived it like she did.”

“Do you have anything to back that suspicion?” Jon asks. 

“Not really, aside from that they went after Evangeline first.”

“The worms?”

Martin nods and he continues the rest of the statement without any input from anyone else. It’s harder now, with the true horror of what he’s seen out in the open and it feels more real than when it was just his and Evangline’s frightened whispers. If he could have, he would have gotten down on the floor to wrap his arms around Evangeline and not let go for hours; it’s what they’d done when they first made it back to the apartment, shivering and shaken, but for now professionality sake, he sits in the chair across from Jon with Evangeline’s head resting on his knee and his hand buried in her fur. 

Martin’s not sure what they’re expecting when he finishes, but whatever it is, it’s not for Jon to offer him the storage room.

“Do you need me to show you which room I’m talking about?”

The storage room is technically next door to Jon’s office, Martin doesn’t really __need__ the escort, but any excuse to have Jon’s focus on him, especially in an instance where he’s not being reprimanded for work errors, is one Martin will take. The storage room is large anyway, nearly as big as the archives, a labyrinth of bookshelves and filing cabinets and small enclosed rooms.

“Sure,” Evangeline answers for them. 

“Alright then,” Jon clicks off the recorder and stands up. Those aches and pains from running have caught up to him and Martin really doesn’t want to stand much less make the two minute walk to the storage room, but he doesn’t think Jon’s generosity would extend to Martin having a kip in his guest chair, nor would Martin’s back thank him later. He gets up as well, trying his best not to wince at the pull of his muscles. Evangeline doesn’t hide it all, huffing and sighing as she pushes up with her back legs while Martin and Jon walk to the door.

In the office, Tim and Sasha are both at their desks, feigning disinterest, a charade that is entirely unconvincing as both Robin and Marisha startle and rush back to their respective humans as soon as the door opens.

Jon ignores them. “Martin’s going to be staying in the Archives.” He gives them some short explanation, but Martin’s attention is pulled to a strange, tingling feeling and he quickly glances over his shoulder into Jon’s office. It’s not the pull of being apart from his daemon that’s taken his attention, Martin’s in the doorway with Evangeline only a few paces behind, it’s that Evangeline’s head is inclined towards the desk, where Octavia is still sat, and they’re talking. Martin could probably listen in if he wanted, but where Martin gets Jon’s attention often enough--albeit usually in a negative sense-- Octavia has only spoken to Evangeline once, and even in, it was just to introduce herself. Its as much as she’s talked to any other daemon Martin’s seen her come across, even Marisha, who she’s known for so long through Jon and Tim working together in Research. 

It kills him, but Martin gives their daemons privacy and turns back to Jon.

“There’s no reason to think she’d come after either of you at home, but we do need to be cautious. Questions?”

“You kept the worms?” Marisha asks. 

“Uh, yeah,” Martin answers.

If Marisha were a bird like Robin, Martin doubts she wouldn’t have just flown in without even bothering to ask. Instead, with Jon and Martin blocking most of the entryway and nothing near enough to the door to climb on, Marisha has climbed up Tim, standing on her tiptoes on his shoulder as if that would give her a better view. Robin is just barely showing restraint, stood at attention at the edge of Sasha’s desk. 

“You can have a look if you want,” Martin says, stepping aside. Evangeline is just barely able to get out of the doorway as both daemons rush in. Tim and Sasha aren’t far behind, though they both stop to give Martin their “glad you’re not dead” tidings. 

With a “don’t you dare open that jar, Tim!” thrown over his shoulder, Jon leads the way into the storeroom. Martin’s not exactly sure what Jon meant by “uses to sleep”, he’ll take anything over his worm-threatened apartment, but he’s really hoping Jon hasn’t taken up shack in the only storeroom with enough free space to lay out on the floor. Thankfully Jon brings them to a small enclosed room where all the filing cabinets have been pushed against one wall, leaving enough room for not only a couch, but a minifridge wedged between it and the wall. The room is small, with no windows, but Martin’s able to step in fully, with Evangeline by his side, and not be pressed up uncomfortably against the cabinets or the couch, so it’s bigger than his first bedsit in that regard.

Beside him, Evangeline leaps onto the large and lumpy couch and roots around until she’s comfortable, and while Martin would love to join her, he knows he’ll fall asleep the second he sits down and Jon is still in the doorway, watching them. 

“It’s not exactly the Ritz, but I’ve always found it …” Jon looks like he’s in pain having to say the next word, “cozy.”

Martin is about to answer it’s more than he expected, when Octavia, who’s been on Jon’s shoulder since they left the office, whispers something in Jon’s ear. 

“This will be alright? It won’t trigger your… claustrophobia?”

Martin blinks. 

“From case number 0140911?”

Martin can’t remember the filing system on a good day, much less running on two weeks of being haunted by a worm monster. 

“Lost John’s Cave?”

“Right! Right, no that’s- I mean, tight squeezes like that do freak me out,” More than freak him out, he could barely stomach being in the office while they worked that case, even after Jon finally allowed him to jump ahead and look into Sebastian Adekoya instead. “But it's only really in extreme circumstances, you know, like the cave or… I mean, neither Evangeline or I are very small, so I feel like I’m hyper aware of that when I’m in a small space, but it’s fine. This room is fine. It’s great, really. Very… cozy.” 

Martin offers a weak smile to Jon, who doesn’t smile back, but seems satisfied with his answer at least.

“You obviously have the whole of the Archives to spread out in if you do happen to find a larger space.”

“Will do, but really this is just fine, but-- I haven’t slept more than an hour or two so…”

“Right, of course.” Jon turns to make a quick exit, but Evangeline sits up suddenly on the couch. 

“Wait, what will you do if you have to stay over?” she asks. 

“We’ll… cross that bridge when we get there. Get some rest.”

With that, Jon finally leaves them alone, closing the door to the storage room behind him. Martin rounds on Evangeline as soon as he hears his footsteps level off.

“You talk to Octavia one time and now you’re best buddies, talking to Jon about sleepovers?” 

Evangeline doesn’t even have the decency to look embarrassed. “It’s a logistical question, I’m not the one who’s been excited at the prospect of sleeping on the same couch your crush might have laid on.”

“You! You have no--”

“I’ll bring it up to Octavia during our next chat.” Evangeline continues, and Martin has no choice but to drop onto her and attack. Evagenline doesn't have fingers for tickling, but she does paw at him and dig her nose into the crease of his neck, and even once, bite down on his arm, though without much force. Finally, they end up with Martin laid out on his back and Evangeline sprawled over his front with the thin blanket (“the same one Jon covered with” Evangeline had crooned) pulled over them, wound together as tightly as they had been when still stuck in the apartment fearing for their lives.

“I’m glad you didn’t get eaten by worms,” Martin whispers into her fur. 

Evangeline had to have known of course, but Martin couldn’t make himself say it with the threat still so pertinent. Only now, with the Institute above them and Jon and Octavia -- and Tim and Sasha and Elias and all the other employees and all their daemons-- right outside Martin feels safe enough to say it out loud. Evangeline had already turned to run back, but Martin saw Jane’s face, the hunger and longing in her eyes as she looked at Evangeline.

He pulls her even closer. 

“Go to sleep Martin,” she murmurs, halfway there herself. 

And Martin is planning to follow her but as he drifts off, yes underneath the same blanket Jon has probably used, a sudden thought crosses his mind and it's disturbing enough it keeps him awake long enough to ask. 

“Did I call Octavia cute?”

Evangeline grumbles a whine that sounds a lot like “don’t know, don’t care”.

“At the beginning of the statement,” Martin clarifies, poking her in the side, “when I said I liked big spiders…”

Martin can tell Evangeline is awake enough to process this, can practically hear the gears turning in her head as she remembers what he said, and then there’s her loud laughter filling the tiny store room. 

“I’m definitely bringing that up in our next chat.”

Martin wants to push her off the sofa, but as he’s said several times in the last thirty minutes, he’s barely gotten any sleep in the last two weeks, and it did take several minutes of a tickle battle to arrange themselves, so he decides to let her off for now, and finally, falls into a deep and restful sleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'll include a list of each daemon we meet per chapter; Evangeline came to me immediately, so she didn't get included in the name convention, but most of the others got their names from horror movies or books. Here we have: 
> 
> Jon - Octavia - a tarantula. Named after Octavia Butler, who mainly wrote sci-fi but had plenty of horror aspects in her writing. Yes, Jon is still scared of spiders. I wanted him to have something small and "creepy crawly" and the image of him with a spider daemon was too tempting to pass up
> 
> Tim - Marisha - a ring tailed lemur. Named after Marisha Pessl, who wrote the modern horror book _Nightfilm_. Lemurs are social and playful so it was a pretty simple choice.
> 
> Sasha - Robin - a crow. Named after Robin Hardy, who directed one of my favorite horror movies, _The Wicker Man_ (1973, not the Nic Cage version). Sasha's daemon was always going to be a bird, but I didn't want something super predatory like a hawk, or small like a songbird, and once I decided on the name I thought the irony of having a daemon named Robin settle into a crow would be fun. Crows are also super intelligent and curious, like our Sasha James.
> 
> I've been in the fandom since April and I'm surprised I haven't come across a daemon!AU before, as it seems a staple of each fandom, because who doesn't love hypothesizing what type of animal companion our favorite characters would get? If you want to chat about your headcanons, or send me your own daemon fic to read, or just if you want some tma memes, you can hit me up on tumblr (also suchakidder). If you have questions/concerns about particular daemons, I will mostly likely go into detail about it in future chapters, but you can always let me know.


	2. Chapter 2

The calm can only last so long and that expiration date is when Martin wakes up, disoriented and cold in a pitch dark room on what is definitely not his bed. There’s a heavy pressure on his chest, weighing him down, and as his eyes adjust the slightest bit to the darkness he can see fur and two big green eyes blinking up at him and instinctively pushes the animal off him just before the recognition sets in.

“Sorry, sorry,” he mutters right as Evangeline hits the floor. It’s not really a long drop and at least she had been already awake, but Martin still feels bad and he sits up and reaches down to pull all of her considerable bulk up and into his arms, patting her up and down for injuries he knows aren’t there.

“Dreaming about the worms?” Evangeline asks, nuzzling into his neck, her voice still thick with sleep.

I won’t lie to my daemon, he tells himself, but what comes out instead is “yeah, sorry.”

“M’fine, though… I don’t really know how you can confuse this for a worm,” she laughs into his skin. They stay like that for a few minutes, Martin languidly stroking Evangeline’s soft fur and trying to wake up, until the weight is too much and Martin has to push her off his lap, though with much more grace this time.

“What time do you think it is?” she asks, stretching out. Martin can still just barely see her. Without any windows, the storage room is dark and of course, he didn’t think to leave any lights on, not even in the main storage area. It’s quiet too, but Martin’s never really spent excess time there to know if sound bleeds over from the Archives.

“I guess we’ll have to get up and see,” Martin says. Going by the sour taste in his mouth and his stiff muscles, Martin guesses it's been a long sleep-- definitely more than the few hours he’d been getting at his apartment. With their luck, he and Evangeline will have slept through to the next day and he’ll walk out into a busy and bustling Archives with bed head and sleep creases on his cheek, but at least it won’t be as bad as yesterday’s dramatic entrance. 

Without the torch on his phone, Martin only has the one overhead light from his small room to light the rest of the storage room, and once he opens his door that light spills out a few meters maximum. Relying on luck and willful ignorance of anything spooky lurking in the shadows, Martin makes it to the outer door in one piece more or less, though there’s a wicked bruise forming on his left shin from a run-in with a bookshelf.

The Archives are still dark when Martin opens the door. There’s a bit of lamplight coming in from the street level windows near the back, at the open work area, but just enough light to confirm that, yep the Archives are still there and Martin is going to have to walk past the darkened row after row of bookshelves to get to his desk. Martin’s not typically scared of the archives or the dark, but mixed together and compounded by the fact he found a worm-infested monster last time he wandered in the dark, he’s more than a little unsettled. After the first two or three shelves, Martin picks up the pace and Evangeline nearly breaks out into a run and soon enough they’ve made it to the relative safety of the workspace and, more importantly, an overhead light Martin can flick on. 

Martin breathes a sigh of relief when the fluorescent light flicks on and the familiar office comes into view, his desk, the fake houseplant Sasha brought in from a charity shop to make the place feel “homey”, the repurposed filing cabinet they’ve made their snack repository (Tim told Jon the key to the bottom drawer’s key has been lost since they moved in, but really the drawer housing the impressive booze collection they have going. Strictly reserved for when they’re off the clock of course). The snack selection is mostly junk, but Martin hasn’t eaten in what must be hours, so heads that way, eying the clock on the left side wall of their workspace says it’s nearly 4:30. 

Martin’s a third of a way into a packet of crisps when Evangeline suddenly goes rigid at his side, and he doesn't scream, thanks very much, but he does drop the bag and look around wildly for a sign of those slithering grey worms, but Evangeline is looking straight at Jon’s office and when Martin focuses he can hear it too, just the faintest hum of a voice. 

“It’s just Jon,” Martin assures her, though their boss at the office at 4:30 in the morning shouldn’t be reassuring, but between another monster and Jon, he knows who he’d prefer. He stands up from his desk chair and walks over. He feels a bit odd knocking on Jon’s door without a cup of tea, but times are strange. He doesn’t wait for an answer to enter.

Jon looks up sharply at the opening of the door, his eyes red-rimmed and slightly obscured by the hair that’s escaped its side-swept style. The look of alarm in his eyes fades quickly, though he doesn’t beckon Martin in. 

“Ah, Martin. I’m glad to see you’re well-rested,” Jon’s voice almost soft enough to make Martin believe he actually means it. Jon’s not one for fake pleasantries though, so Martin will take it. “There’s some takeaway for you in the break room.” 

Jon goes back to his work; a sea of documents spread over his desk with a stack of manilla folders to one side that nearly towers over Jon’s computer monitor. He doesn’t glance up once, and from Evangeline’s eyes darting about the room, it seems Octavia hasn’t even found the conversation interesting enough to come out of whatever corner she’s crawled into. 

Accepting a half-meant pleasantry is one thing, but a dismissal, however, Martin will not take. 

“Do you know what time it is Jon?”

Jon finally pulls his glance away from his desk with a sigh. “I’m going to guess it’s late.”

“It’s 4:30.”

There’s no sign this shocks Jon in the slightest. “ I hadn’t realized it had gotten that late, but I supposed it makes sense. Thanks to today’s… activities, it was rather hard to get Tim and Sasha to focus, and then I had to speak with Elias about security and you know how that goes.”

_Well, I’m sorry my imprisonment caused such an inconvenience,_ Martin wants to say though, at the same time, he is truly sorry. He didn’t want it to be a bother to anyone else; he and Evangeline had many conversations on who they’d even call if Martin hadn’t dropped his phone, and what he would have said. Anyone who’d come to rescue him from his apartment would have been in danger from Jane and while fire seemed to work well enough in Timothy Hodges’s case, he hadn’t described the worms moving like Martin had seen them, fast and intent. And in any case, even if fire would have worked, Martin doubted “saving myself from a supernatural parasite” would work as a legal defense and he certainly couldn’t handle the legal ramifications of arson.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean --”

“No-no, it was hardly your fault Jane Prentiss stalked you. I just meant that it took a long time to get into the rhythm of work and when I finally did, I must not have noticed time slipping away.”

“But you must have been at this for hours. I mean _hours._ You need some sleep. You can use the couch.” 

Evangeline huffs her agreeance at his side. Martin looks down and notices her attention is focused on the window, so Martin followers her gaze to see Octavia is slowly crawling along the sill, her velvet black hair shimmering as she passes in and out of the faint beams of streetlight that spill in. It’s a sight Martin has to tear himself from to focus back on Jon.

“I’m fine. It’s not the first time I’ve stayed up all night working,” Jon says firmly and Martin can hear the annoyance creeping into his voice.

“That’s actually not very reassuring, Jon.”

“I’m not tired Martin, so really I would be depriving you of a bed for no reason.”

“You do realize I just slept nearly fifteen hours. I don’t think I could fall back asleep if I tried and without my phone, it’s not even like I can distract myself with anything. What would I even do?”

“There’s a plethora of old statements to read,” Jon says. There’s a soft, sweet chuckle that takes Martin a moment to place before he realizes it’s Octavia, still on a patch of dark window sill, only the gleam from her two central eyes visible. It takes Martin another moment to realize she’s laughing because it was a joke from Jon, but it provides a solution.

“Yeah sure, why don’t I take something off your hands.” Martin gestures to the accumulated work on the desk and Jon sets his hands down on the paper, almost possessive. 

“It was a joke, Martin. I can’t possibly make you work on your time off.” 

“I just had two straight weeks of off time.” 

Jon pushes back from his desk with a sigh Martin recognizes and he keeps himself from smiling too widely at the argument he’s just won.

“Fine, I’ll… find something you can do to help with this. But if you haven’t eaten since your apartment, you really should get to that first.”

“Have you eaten recently?” Martin counters.

“I… had supper, I think.”

Which is how Martin ends up trailing after Jon through the empty Institute a few minutes later, standing closer to Jon than normal to stay in the circle of light his phone torch provides. Any excitement from the fact his hand has accidentally brushed Jon’s a few times is lessened by the fact Martin still has to contend with more dark corridors and shadows and the general creepiness of traveling them after hours. Luckily, Jon seems to be in just as much a hurry as Martin is, and they make it up the two flights of stairs and brief walk down the hall to the breakroom in only a few minutes.

The takeaway is from the kebab shop they usually get once a week. There’s actually a few boxes, all with his name in Sasha’s flowy script. There’s lamb doner, his usual, and a falafel wrap, his occasional order, and what seems like every side dish on the menu. Martin swallows back a lump as grateful tears threaten to spill out. 

“Here, there’s more than enough to share,” Martin says once he’s sure his voice won’t wobble.

“I couldn’t. I’m sure I have some leftovers of my own in the fridge…” Jon starts, but he’s eying the line of boxes on the counter with a longing look and Octavia has climbed up the cabinet directly above. 

“Sasha left me more than I could possibly eat.” 

“Yes, she left it for you.”

“Buy me lunch then,” Martin finally gripes, “if you’re so bound to make up for it.”

Jon huffs and his arms are tight across his chest, but there’s no further protest and so Martin divvies up equal leftovers onto their plates and fills two glasses with water while the food spins in the microwave. Once the food is done and the drinks are served and the utensils fetched and Martin and Jon are sitting at the breakroom table, there’s really not much to distract Martin from the fact it’s the first time he’s been alone with Jon outside of work. The irony that they’re still technically _at_ work isn’t lost on Martin, but it’s not as if they have a case to discuss or Jon’s berating Martin for some error in documenting his research. It’s the two of them and their daemons and their plates of kebab and Martin is aware he has no idea of what to say except for -- “so what did I miss?”

Jon’s ability for steadfast skepticism is never more on display when he lists off an actual cannibal priest between a new acquisition in the library and an inter-department meeting where Elias discussed several new energy-saving protocols for electronic devices.

“Wait… he actually ate people?” Martin interrupts. “That’s not the contested part?” 

Jon doesn’t look too annoyed by the interruption, he finishes his bite of kebab before responding. “Yes, you can look him up, I’m pretty sure it was in the news.”

Martin certainly will, as well as listening to Jon’s recording as soon as he can. In the meantime, he is still astounded by Jon’s utter lack of regard for the less than mundane parts of their jobs. 

“Then what was the statement about if he’s a documented killer? More vampires?” Martin asks, spearing a chunk of lettuce and feta cheese on his fork. 

“He… claimed it was some sort of possession.”

“And in the batches of statements you’ve done while I was gone, the one that scared you most was the guy who bought too much meat?”

Jon rolls his eyes. “People kill people all the time; people don’t buy copious amounts of meat from an unknown source and nail them to the wall. And I said concerned, not scared.” Jon gestures firmly with his fork to punctuate that statement and all Martin can think of is the bits of lamb on their plates.

Evangeline, from her spot lying next to his feet, lets out a small whine, and she doesn’t even eat. “Maybe we should talk about something else,” Martin suggests.

Jon agrees but doesn’t supply any new topics, seemingly unperturbed to spend the next few minutes eating in silence. Evangeline gets up and makes a slow circle around the room, restless. Martin still hasn’t found the time to ask her what Octavia said to her, but Evangeline can’t expect Octavia to suddenly be chatty when the past months have proved that she’s anything but. Evangeline is used to Marisha and Robin and isn’t one to sit idly by while Martin engages in conversation, but at least she could listen in while Jon and Martin were talking. 

“So…” Martin finally begins. “I read _Atonement_ three times while I was stuck in my flat. Have you read it?”

“No,” Jon answers quickly, with finality and Martin is just barely able to hold in a groan. Evangeline doesn’t even bother to hide it, but she's far enough away that thankfully, Jon doesn’t seem to hear it. Martin will just accept the rest of his silent dinner, but he seems to have judged too quickly when Jon continues.

“I’ve read a few books by him, but _Atonement_ seemed too ... schmaltzy.” 

“Oh no!” Martin replies, perhaps a bit too eagerly. “It’s not schmaltzy at all. All the film trailers really focused on that but it’s not about the romance, not really... Well, it is, but it’s more about… writing and relationships and subjective truth vs objective truth.”

“It’s truth,” Jon says, “there shouldn’t be various forms of it.” 

“Well, it’s a bit like the statement givers. They believe what happened to them, even if it’s…” Martin hesitates to discredit what they experienced, even if Jon doesn’t believe in any of the supernatural elements, “not provable.”

“I know. I’ve tried to express that sentiment when considering the beliefs of the statement givers. Not that it’s helped,” Jon mutters bitterly. 

It had been snowing, sleeting really, the day Martin had come back from lunch to find a petite woman, standing a few steps past the Institute entrance with a look so hopeless and distraught that Martin couldn’t find it in himself to walk past her, despite the cold and wet. It hadn’t been the urge to comfort her that rooted him to the spot, he hadn’t even thought to offer her something for the tears silently streaming down her pale cheeks until she was already rooting around for a tissue in her purse and by then the moment was over and her sorrow had turned to bitterness as she talking about the asshole in the Archives.

Martin doesn’t want to bring up Naomi Hearne now though, so he diverts the conversation back to Ian McEwan and books and the rest of their extremely late dinner/early breakfast is spent discovering other shared authors between them. Martin has a long list of authors he’s going to check out, and Jon’s even said he might possibly read _Atonement_ if he can find the time. 

It’s not till Martin’s back at his desk, attempting to look up the military history of a soldier from the Revolutionary War that he remembers what it was about Naomi Hearne that held him so transfixed. The Institute isn’t in a slow part of London-- even if their street doesn’t see continuous car traffic, there’s always the noise of it and people and the buzzing of machinery and other ambient city noise-- but when Martin stood close enough to Naomi, it was like he’d slipped on noise-canceling headphones over his ears and he hadn’t heard anything, not even Evangeline panting next to him.

As if she’s remembering it too, Evangeline whines and pushes herself up against Martin’s legs under the desk. He pats the top of her head, more to comfort himself than anything, and shivers.

“Best not to linger on that,” he tells her, and they get back to work. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy October! It's my favorite time of the year and in a Halloween miracle, south Louisiana has been blessed with temps under 80!  
> I plan to have chapters out around Wednesday/Thursday, and had all but the last few paragraphs done this Wednesday night, but I'd been sick all week and it got worse Thursday so I didn't have the energy to even look at this until today. I'm gonna still trying to Wed/Thurs weekly schedule, but if not, it will be posted in a week at most. Thanks for reading!


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm adding negative self-talk as a tag for this chapter. I always found it really optimistic in HDM that humans would have such a positive relationship with their daemons when in reality, pretty much everyone I know struggles in some sense with accepting their identity. This chapter is pretty light, all things considered, but it won't be the only instance as we move forward into more stressful events, and maybe the intense flashback or two ;)

Martin is 50-something pages in a colonial American military database, Evangeline laying out in her bed beside his desk, when suddenly his daemon perks up. Martin looks at the ground first, then Jon’s office, but the disturbance is actually swooping in from the double doors to the hall. Robin lands on Martin’s computer monitor, causing it to wobble back and forth for a nerve-wracking moment, (it will somehow be his fault, of course, if he has to tell Jon that Sasha’s daemon broke his computer) but it finally stills and Robin tilts his head in greeting at Martin. Only a moment or two later, small black fingers grip the base of his desk, and Martin is given his second moment of panic in as many minutes, but it’s only Marisha, using Martin’s desk to vault over it and onto Evangeline’s back. His monitor wobbles again as Robin pushes off to join Marisha and Evangeline, and Martin has to actually physically grab it to keep it steady.

Tim and Sasha are only another few seconds behind, walking in the double doors with their arms laden with shopping bags, but they stop in their tracks when they see Martin at his desk.

“You’re awake,” Sasha says.

“You don’t have to sound so disappointed,” Martin says. Whatever their humans are feeling, Marisha and Robin are excited at the reunion, giving Evangeline hugs and pecks and overlapping questions. 

“We figured you’d be asleep still, or at the very least, not at work. It’s only a quarter after 8!” Sasha exclaims. 

“We had a whole plan--cake, a banner, maybe some sparklers,” Tim says with a laugh. 

“You absolutely cannot have sparklers in the office, Tim-” Jon states, standing in the doorway of his office. “I don’t know how many times I’ve said--”

“No open flames in the Archives,” Tim finishes for him, adopting his best Jon accent. Martin’s is the best, but it’s only come out the one pub night the two have managed to get him absolutely trashed. “It was only a joke, boss, obviously.” 

At the same time, Marisha, facing Sasha and Martin, mouths “no it wasn’t” while shaking her head and sets them all off giggling again. 

“Anyway, the surprise is ruined--show us the new place,” Tim says. 

Martin’s waiting for Jon’s disapproval, for him to remind them to stop fooling around and get to work, even if it’s not 9 yet, but Jon waves them off with a neutral, if a bit bored, expression and retreats back into his office, though he keeps the door cracked open a bit. 

Having Tim and Sasha in the office brings an energy Martin’s been sorely needing after two weeks of isolation, even if he couldn’t identify that need before. It’s almost like sitting in front of a UV lamp, soaking in their laughter and banter and the competition for the most overembellished compliment on the storage room that literally has no personal touch of Martin’s except whatever skin cells and hair shed off while he slept. 

“The commute must be amazing,” Robin says in his high voice.

“And humidity controlled? Looking for a roommate?” Tim asks though he has to bat off Marisha for that comment.

“I like our flat,” She whines plaintively, getting a hand free so she can pinch Tim in the side. 

It doesn’t escape Martin’s notice how lightly they’re taking this, like he’s choosing to camp out at the Archives for fun and not because his life was just recently, and perhaps currently, at risk, but he tries to bury that thought. It’s nice, Tim and Sasha showing enthusiasm to have him back and voicing their apologies that they hadn’t checked on him. 

“I thought you quit,” Tim says, while Martin is still in Sasha’s hold. She always gives amazing hugs, warm and close and always the right length--long, but never constricting or awkward, but she pulls away to swat at Tim. 

“No, you didn’t.”

“I did!” Tim assures her, this time earning another pinch from Marisha. “You have nearly a decade of experience in the library! I thought you found something better and had gotten the hell out of here without looking back.” 

“I would give at least a two-week notice! But I’m not, you know I’m not looking for a new job or anything.” Martin scrambles to say, even though he had written more than a few resignation letters in his two weeks of imprisonment. He’d started earlier, actually, wrote out a long letter to Jon, one weekend after an intense week near the beginning of his time in the Archives, but that had been venting, and he’d burnt the letter in the sink after. 

“I know you wouldn’t. That should have been a clue something was going on, but… we obviously missed it. I’m really, sorry.” 

Martin tries to deflect, it’s not as if he wouldn’t have made the same decision to overlook his co-workers extended absence (he wouldn’t have) or that they should have stormed his flat or something (though, he sometimes let himself hope somebody would come looking) but Tim and Sasha are both adamant on their apologies, and there’s silence for a few moments, even their daemons have stopped talking. 

“We brought presents though!” Sasha exclaims after the awkward moment’s had its time, and she holds up one of the many bags she’d brought back to the storage room with them. 

Inside the bags, Martin finds lots of food-- staples and lots of fresh bread for sandwiches and a wide variety of a fancy brand of soup that promise real and fresh veggies, and a few plastic containers from Tim’s, that hold kimchi and bulgogi and a few other dishes-- but also a few blankets of varying thickness, a prepaid brick cell phone, and a book of contemporary short stories. Martin goes in for another round of hugs after all the food is sorted away before they all head into the office. 

Jon is waiting for them in the open workspace, no doubt with an order to get back to work, but before he can say anything, Robin flies in and lands on a forgotten bag Sasha had left at her desk when they went to the storage room. “Wait, Martin, you’ll need this too.” 

“Right,” Sasha says, Robin taking up perch on her shoulder after she picks up the bag and hands it to Martin. 

Martin looks down to see a sailboat spotted shower curtain in his hands. Evangeline pads over to inspect it. “Thanks?”

“It’s for the shower,” Sasha explains. 

“The showers?” Martin and Jon both ask at the same time. 

“In Artefact Storage?” Sasha and Robin’s head whip back and forth between the two of them, waiting for some sort of recognition. “Seriously Jon, what do you do when you stay overnight?”

“Obviously, I go back to my flat to freshen up when the trains start again,” Jon says with derision, though he does push the rebellious strand of hair out of his face at her words. “Why would any department here have a shower?”

“It’s more of a chemical burn station, or whatever the supernatural equivalent of chemicals are. But it does have hot water, and a drain in the floor, so once you get the curtain strung up somehow you should be good to go. What was your plan for showering, Martin?”

Martin, honestly, hadn’t thought that far.

“I never knew that,” Tim says in amusement. “Did you ever see it get used?”

“Yeah, once,” Robin answers.

“Oh. Did it work?” Jon asks. 

“Physically it got all the ink off, but I think the damage is more psychological than physical,” Sasha says brightly.

“Right then, Jon, did you need something?” Tim asks. 

“Right, Martin, I’m sure you’d like some of your things from your flat and since Tim and Sasha told me it would be bad form to do it yesterday while you were asleep--”

“--really bad form,” Tim amends.

“Would you like to go? One of us will escort you, of course. Or you could make a list if you’d rather not go back.”

Disregarding the fact Jon was planning on going through his things and picking what Martin would want on his own discretion, Martin is torn on what to do. On the one hand, he hasn’t been able to think about his flat without breaking out in a cold sweat, part of him wants to break the lease and never have to go near it again. But while he can replace most things, his laptop is his most expensive purchase ever at nearly one thousand quid, and his wardrobe was hard enough to cobble together at his height and stature. He’ll need to pick up at least a week worth of clothes to have on rotation unless he wants to be stuck in this current outfit, and as he sweated through the armpits of his inner layer while running here, he really would rather change. 

There’s also the fact his flat is... less than impressive, even without clothes and fabric stuffed into all the cracks and rubbish bags he couldn’t take out to the bin piling up in the kitchen. It's the best place he's lived since moving to London, though that's not saying much. The building itself isn't too bad, but clearly not very well taken care of. The bricks are covered in the years of accumulated cigarette smoke and weather damage, the front garden is overgrown, the one chair placed out for occupants has long since been reclaimed by the weeds and grass, and out back near the bins, there’s a pile of discarded furniture that’s only ever grown since Martin’s moved in three years ago. Inside, Martin's flat is small and dingy and he hasn't done much to disguise the fact. Besides a couple posters and knickknacks, there's nothing of character; his bedroom is mostly boxes, his bed wedged in as an afterthought. He doesn't even know why he bothers to bring them, move after move, if he never even unpacks them, but they are all that's left of his childhood home, the random odds and ends his mother had at one time thought of preserving. 

“It’s fine, I can go by myself,” Martin says, “none of you need to come.” He prays the practical, uptight, no-nonsense Jon that’s been missing most of the morning will finally rear his head and agree with him before ordering everyone back to work, but not before telling Martin heading to his flat would have to be done on his lunch break, but no luck there.

“No way, at least one person needs to go with you, maybe all of us,” Tim says. “With Prentiss still out there, we have to be careful.”

“I can handle it on my own, if she should come back,” Martin says.

Just his luck, Jon’s stubbornness is kicking in here. “I sincerely doubt that,” Jon says with a snort.

“What Jon means is, you got trapped in your apartment for two weeks last time. We’re coming,” Sasha says firmly.

What’s more embarrassment then, Martin thinks. He looks to Evangeline, who’s been watching the exchange silently the whole time. 

“What do you think?”

“Let’s go,” she says.

They all go. Jon at first tries to argue for just him and Martin, as they’ve already done a few hours of work (which erupts into a mini-argument on how Jon needs to better at work-life balance for Martin’s sake. “He insisted--” “--I did!” “--that really doesn’t help your case, Jon”) but Tim gets him to agree it’s probably better to have more manpower, even if they don’t really know how to defend against Prentiss, and Sasha refuses to be left behind. 

Tim and Sasha talk to him the entire bus ride over. It’s not as if they’re purposefully exclusive in past conversations, but they’ve worked together, along with Jon, in Research for several years, and there’s a familiarity and history there. Even when they do purposefully try to include Martin in the conversation, he’s more often than not, a mostly silent observer in the conversations, though they have the good graces to never make it awkward. Engaging with just one or the other is better, but even then, Martin feels like he can only hold their attention, anyone’s attention, for so long.

But not today. Even though they’ve both listened to the statement, they both have questions, Sasha with a million on practical issues with his imprisonment, Tim’s focusing on Prentiss herself and everything Martin could remember. Marisha and Robin are just as rapt, not breaking off into a conversation amongst themselves or Evangeline, but actively listening to Martin and supplying a few of their own questions. 

Terribly, Martin covets it, and wonders if this the headiness of having a story to tell is what prompts the obviously fake statements, the ones that easily get disproved or have no proof to disprove, the ones that record fine digitally. The attention is all on him and Evangeline and nothing he can say is wrong; even if he messes up part of the story or forgets something, it can be chalked up to lasting effects of witnessing something so wrong. 

Snippets of a poem are coming to, nothing very concrete but the shape of something, the inherent loneliness that welcomes a haunting. He wishes he had a pen or paper to jot it down, or even the recorder he’s got in the front drawer of his desk, but he’ll have to hang on to it for now. 

Following the wisps of a forming narrative distracts Martin enough that he doesn’t notice the distance passing and suddenly they’re at his stop and it’s time to get off the bus. It had been late last time he’d come this way, a dark and blustering night that would have had Martin hurrying to get inside even if he hadn’t been sure he was being followed, but it’s daytime now, and he and Evangeline are not alone. He scratches at behind her ears calmingly, to soothe both of them. 

Once they’re all off the bus, Tim scoops up Marisha (“don’t want you stepping in anything”) and she clings onto his back like a booksack, but other than, there are no comments about the state of his neighborhood. If they pull faces or wince at it, he’s not sure, as he keeps his eyes forward, adamant he’s not going to check.

Martin leads them to the back entrance— his unit is closer to that side and the path cut into the front garden has him checking for bugs on a normal day— and gives a curt hello to one of his neighbors, smoking on their patio. The backdoor is held open with a brick, and they file inside. His flat is a straight shot from the back door, if Prentiss were here they would have seen her or her worms once he opened the outside door, but there are several interior doors to pass first and he has to hold his breath and close his eyes each time. Each step down the hallway makes the little pain in his chest strike harder and spread wider, as if the fear is physically affecting him, but he powers forward anyway. There’s a ringing in his ears, a whine really, and he can’t concentrate when he gets out his keys and fumbles for the right one once they arrive at the paint-flaking door that denotes his sorry residence. His hand is shaking badly once he finally gets to the key, and between the whine in his ears and the pain in his chest, he can’t concentrate enough to get into the lock.

“Martin,” Sasha begins, her voice gentle and at his side. She lays her hand over his shivering one. “Are you sure you’re alright?”

“I’m—”

“Martin,” another female voice snaps. “Look at Evangeline.”

Evangeline is the other end of the hallway, facing them with her back hunched up against the door, her ears flat against her head. She’s actively pushing against the floor with her front paws, like she would get even further away if she could. Martin should have realized the pain was the tug at their bond, she’s nearly five meters away, but he had been so determined to push through. _Is_ still determined to push through. 

He takes a step towards her, the clench on his heart instantly loosening, but the relief is only physical. Equal parts fear and shame are welling up inside him as he continues walking towards her and realizes the whine is audibly coming from her. 

“Evangeline?”

“I can’t go in there,” she whispers, eyes darting desperately behind Martin’s and their door. “It’s fine,” Martin says, trying his hardest to keep his own desperation out of his voice. “We’ll be quick. In and out.”

“Martin, it’s fine. You can tell us what to get and we’ll get it for you,” Sasha says in the same steady voice, approaching them slowly with her hands slightly spread like she’s approaching a hurt animal.

“No. We can do it,” Martin says to her before turning back to his cowering daemon. “Come on, Evangeline, please. Everyone’s already come down here, please just come inside.”

“I can’t, Martin. I _can’t_.”

Not for the first time, Martin wishes she had settled as a field mouse, her favorite form. They'd both always wanted something small and manageable, some form where his pocket was solace where she could hide away from the outside world. Instead, she’s large and cumbersome and so unavoidable and if Martin wants her in the apartment he would have to drag and heave and --

“Ok,” Martin says finally, to the anxious faces of his co-workers and their daemons, all closer to his side of the hallway. He looks back at Evangeline. “We’ll… wait outside?”

Evangeline nods her approval eagerly.

Martin gives them a list, wracking his brain to make sure he’s remembering it all without physically being there and seeing it all. Clothes, the entirety of his shower caddy and medicine cabinet, his laptop, a journal or two. There are a few things he’ll have to go to the store for--he’s certainly not going to ask them to get a corkscrew--but nothing that would break the bank. And then he heads outside, alone with Evangeline 

The whining stops as soon as they step out of the building, but Martin would almost prefer it to what he knows is coming next.

“I’m sorry Martin, I’m so sorry, I tried, I’m sorry.” Evangeline's rambles out quickly, apology after apology with tears in her voice. Martin looks out at the distance, past the chain-link fence at the back of the garden, into the alleyway and the backs of other run-down dingy apartments like his. If he meets Evangeline’s eye, if he sees her tears and downturned mouth, her pitiful expression… Standing, he has a few feet on Evangeline but all he wants to sink down, back against the wall, and put his head in his head and cry, but if he does that, he’ll be at her level, and she’ll nose against him, trying to comfort him and he really doesn’t want that. He doesn’t want to be anywhere near her right now.

Their neighbor, an older woman with dyed red hair and a hedgehog daemon, has flicked the cigarette butt into the large pile that outlines the stretch of their patio but is still sitting in her chair, watching Martin and Evangeline with impassive eyes. He doesn’t even care what a pitiful scene they make. 

“It’s fine.” He snaps, disrupting her endless repetition of apologies. He makes the mistake of looking down at her, trying to hammer in his point, but she’s looking up at him with watery eyes and shocked expression.

“It’s not fine!” she wails. 

“Yes, alright? I know it’s not fine--”

“--I know I messed up, I’m so sorry, I tried--” Evangeline continues.

“What do you want me to say?” Martin continues on, not caring what she’s saying. “That it’s pitiful and embarrassing? We finally, finally, aren’t the laughingstock of the office, that Jon took us seriously and now you… you…” Martin has to stop or the tears really will come. 

The silence grows and Martin tugs at his collar where sweat has begun to collect, even though it's still cold out, overcast, and slightly damp. The sweat cools as it dries and he shivers into his jumper, hoping he told someone to get him his actual coat. Evangeline sits next to him, whimpering softly and trying to fold in on herself, but at least she doesn’t try apologizing again. 

Apologizing is a tempting direction, but Martin can’t make himself feel sorry for his feelings and while a hollow apology might settle a bit of the pain, it won’t settle anything in the long run. And if he doesn’t apologize, just lets the tension grow and fester until one of them can’t handle it and explodes, that would be worse. He’s never wanted Evangeline to have to tiptoe around his emotions like he did with his mother, knowing that her attention brought derision and scorn more often than it did affection. It’s the only pattern of conflict resolution he knows and he knows it’s wrong, but he doesn’t know what’s right, has only ever had the negative of a path to follow, a path that only outlines what he shouldn’t do. 

“I'm not sorry, Evangeline,” Martin says finally, stiffly, “but I do wish there would have been a scenario that you would have been comfortable with that wouldn’t have humiliated me, but it didn’t work that way. I’m still cross… but that’s something I have to deal with, ok?”

Evangeline nods, this at least she can handle.

“So we’re moving on?” Another nod. “Cool. So I think Octavia talked to me.”

Evangeline’s tail thumps against the ground she wags it so forcefully, and then she pushes herself up onto four legs to dart around him. “What? When? Where?”

“Just now, in the hallway. I didn’t actually _see_ her, but unless Sasha had a drastic voice change--”

“What did it sound like?” she asks eagerly.

“A bit like Mrs. Mulligan,” the librarian from their primary school, “but hot.”

“Yes,” Evangeline sighs. “That’s exactly her.”

“Sorry, I forgot you’re the expert now,” Martin teases.

Evangeline takes the bait, shrieking and jumping up on him with her front paws at his chest. “You’re just jealous!” Evangeline fires back. 

“Jealous? I talk to Jon every day,” Martin counters, rubbing her head for good measure. “I don’t moon after someone I’ve talked to, how much was it now, twice?” Well, that’s somewhat a lie; he’s certainly intrigued by Octavia and has thought about stroking the back of her abdomen and feeling that velvet hair against his fingers, but he doesn’t know how much of that is the residual attraction to Jon that bleeds over. 

“Twice!” Evangeline pushes off him, leaving dirty footprints on the striped blue and grey wool, but at least its mostly dry dirt that comes off as Martin brushes at it. “But she did tell I should talk to her if I saw any signs of worms or Prentiss.”

“Wow, Jon said the exact same thing to me.” 

“I’m going to bite you till you bleed,” Evangeline threatens, though she’s never made good on that promise. 

“So that’s what Octavia was talking to you about yesterday?”

“Yes. She asked if I was alright, and when I tried to say we were fine, she specified she wanted to know about me,” Evangeline says, with a little bit of preening in posture. 

“That’s it? The bar’s really low.”

Evangeline doesn’t even threaten, this time she darts in and nips at his hand, pressing down while Martin tries to shake out of her grip.

“You alright there?” Tim asks, suddenly appearing in the now open back door. 

Evangeline drops his hand and Martin pulls back, there are teeth marks but no broken skin, though his hand smarts as he rubs it against his jeans to get the slobber off. 

“Fine,” Evangeline answers hastily. 

The rest of the group are shortly behind him with their spoils, thankfully a small load. There’s his one big duffle bag, the only bit of luggage he owns, a few paper bags, and his overcoat that he happily accepts from Sasha. 

No one mentions the mess inside, though Tim ribs him goodnaturedly over his old Lord of the Rings musical poster, and no one tries to coddle him about not being able to come inside his apartment. Octavia, visible now, on the lapel of Jon’s overcoat, and Marisha, peeking over Tim’s shoulder, both confirm they could smell trace amounts of the musty smell, but neither try to use that as justification for Evangeline staying behind. 

When they get on the bus Evangeline jumps up into the seat next to him but is careful to keep herself contained on her side, even if a standard bus seat was not meant to house a fully-grown St. Bernard. Everyone has been good at ignoring any tension between them so far, and it continues 

They spend the ride back across the river in a debate that starts over the question if Elias should just comp a hotel stay rather than have an employee live at work then moves onto what should be reasonable workplace hazards and what they might convince Elias to cover. They band together to rile up Jon, who’s insisting he’s on professionality’s side, not Elias’s when he defends their boss’s stinginess, and even Octavia laughs at him. At some point, Martin looks down to realize he’s placed his hand over Evangeline’s back and doesn’t remove it, quietly content in whatever this new normal is shaping up to be. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Real talk, I know Martin likes recorders for the lo-fi feel, but is he a notes app poet?
> 
> Also for those who haven't read the series, humans cannot be physically separated from their daemons by more than a couple yards. There's no set limit of how far is too far, but with Martin at his doorway and Evangeline at the end of the hallway, their bond was being stretched to its limit, so he couldn't go any further without her.
> 
> As always, I'm on tumblr as suchakidder if you want to stop by!


	4. Chapter 4

Once they get back to the Archives, Jon finally tells them all to get to work, a reasonable request as it's now an hour and a half into the work day, but not before dispersing some new safety measures. The first few are well received— no breaking into basements, a voice or video call if someone is going to be away from work for a day or longer, closing all doors firmly— but Tim and Sasha object quite vocally to his last one.

“No going out after dark?” Tim asks. “It’s worms, not the blitz.”

Jon bristles a bit, and crosses his arms over his chest. “All instances of Prentiss attacking or the parasite… releasing from a victim have happened at night, it’s not a far reach to assume that is when the parasite is most active.”

“But Prentiss knocked all hours of the day, right Martin?” Sasha asks. 

“Right,” Martin answers reluctantly. It’s not only that he doesn’t want to be in opposition to Jon, but also, his advice isn’t quite as ridiculous as the others seem to find it. The thought that whatever Jane Prentiss is now is still out there is terrifying, no matter the time, but there is some comfort in the daylight where they have a better chance of seeing her or her worms.

“It’s only a suggestion,” Jon snaps. “The Archives will get rather crowded if we all have to take refuge here. Now, can we please get back to work?”

The day passes like almost every other day at the Archives. It’s a bit strange to be on the other side of the investigation, but Martin still has his work from the morning to finish before he can tackle following up on his own statement. Which he does, around noon, collecting all the information on Nathaniel Thorp into one tidy file folder before heading to Jon’s office. Jon takes the folder without looking at it, instead taking the opportunity to ask the detailed, precise questions they never typically get to ask the subjects of their statements. It’s a bit exhausting and Martin can tell he’s not giving Jon the answers he wants, but Jon does apologize when he inevitably snaps at each “I don’t know” or “I don’t remember”. When Jon is finally satisfied enough to let him go, Sasha is waiting for him in their workspace. 

Sasha’s desk is covered in the research they’d only just filed away with Timothy Hodge’s statement: news articles from Prentiss hospitalization and escape, the statements Tim had been able to get from the witnesses that had been at Whittington Hospital that day, the information from Elias’s contact at the ECDC. They’ll have to open it all up again now that they’re on the defensive; Sasha informs him Tim’s actually back at the ECDC testing the worms now. 

There’s a blank statement form on top of all the other files, but it’s not the typical archival format he’s used to.

“You want me to fill out a police report about this?” Martin asks skeptically.

“For you phone,” Sasha corrects, looking up at him over the rim of her glasses.

Martin feels a bit of an idiot for that, but Sasha pats his arm assuringly. 

“Don’t worry. I too get so caught up in our world of bagged teeth and haunted trees that I forget sometimes perfectly mundane, unlawful events do occur.”

“But she didn’t ___steal___ our phone,” Evangeline points out. “She just picked it up off the ground.” 

“Semantics,” Robin says with a laugh.

“It’s really just a formality anyway. I have a friend at the station who will track it for us but she’ll need your written consent first”

Martin fills out a very censored statement, essentially leaving out everything aside from the basics— a woman in a red dress took his phone in Archway— and goes with Sasha to the station to turn it in. The PC asks him a few questions and his ferret daemon similarly interrogates Evangeline, but it’s easy stuff, nothing like the grilling earlier with Jon. Tim meets them when they’re finishing up and Martin lets the two of them take him out to lunch at an actual restaurant, not just a shop, but begs off for after work drinks, legitimately too tired. 

And so time passes; new routines are made. Jon gets to work earlier and earlier, as Martin learns the disastrous morning he goes to drop some research off at Jon’s desk in just his pants and a sleep shirt, and now Martin’s just come to expect Jon to be at the Archives not long after sunrise. Some mornings, Martin sleeps in to a reasonable 7:45, but most mornings he wakes up to his alarm at 6 (there’s no sunrise in his windowless room) and gets tea and light breakfast started. Sasha always tuts when she gets in at 8:50 and sees Martin and Jon have already done an hour or two of work, but Martin genuinely ___likes___ the schedule. The earlier he wakes up, the less time he has to spend alone at night. Most mornings he works on his own projects anyway! But telling Sasha he spent the morning looking about which fabrics might withstand burrowing worms doesn’t do much to relieve her disapproval, so Martin just accepts it.

The best mornings are spent at the back of the Archives, or in the storage room itself, searching for Jane Prentiss’s statement. The organization of the Archives is really as bad as Jon is always harping on about. On the same shelves, it’s just as likely to find a completely researched and resolved statement from 1971 as it is to find loose sheets of notes written in blocky script on lined paper. They even come across sketches, sometimes mundane, sometimes gory, macabre illustrations that Jon rips out of his hand before he stares too long. 

Unless they’re exceedingly lucky, it takes an hour or more per shelf and so it’s slow-going work, just Jon and Martin and their daemons and the rustle of papers in the early morning silence. It’s Octavia who breaks it most often, offering observations as she climbs up the shelves or sometimes ___into___ the cabinets, going far enough back that her voice begins to get muffled and for Martin, who hasn’t been able to lose sight of Evangeline since she settled, it’s unsettling how calm they both are when she skitters into the depths of the Archives. 

They don’t find Jane Prentiss’s statement— they mostly find disproved statements, ghost sightings, haunted houses, those urban legends of monstrous daemons who hunt at night or ghosts who haunt without one— but they find a few real statements Jon will have to record later and there’s a bit of pride that takes root in Martin’s chest when Jon doles out tasks to him, Tim, and Sasha and Martin’s already in the know having heard Jon’s steady, crisp voice read the statement to him in the stillness of their mornings alone. Evangeline actually does preen, and she’s quick to tell Ron and Marisha her “insider information” even after Martin’s asked her multiple times to stop embarrassing them.

Martin can only imagine what they think of him, pleased that he's reading statements with Jon unreasonably early in the morning, not even because Jon’s asked him to, but because he has nowhere else to go. He sees the pitying looks Tim and Sasha give him when they think he can’t see, catches every implication when Sasha tells Martin it's great to be cautious but it’s nothing, really, the first time he thinks he sees a worm in the Institute, but they just don’t understand. It is a bit embarrassing, Martin’s not immune to that shame, but he’s not going to go home because Tim and Sasha think he’s overreacting and he’s not going to confine himself in the storage room in the mornings, hearing Jon move around and knowing he could use the help, on some principle of self-worth. 

The weekends are when the truly pitiful reality of his situation grinds on him anyway. All that empty space, hours and hours that stretch while Martin and Evangeline are all alone in this grand building with nothing to do. It’s nothing new, just a different shade of the loneliness that’s been nearly as constant a companion as Evangeline. At his apartment, he could at least sink hours into some mind-numbing chore like wiping down every baseboard or scrubbing the interior of his fridge, but his living space is now a closet in a storage room that’s mostly filled with things that aren’t his and a desk and he can only clean those so much without incurring Jon’s irritation at messing with his Archives. Instead, Martin tries to spend the daytime outside of the Institute, going on long walks with Evangeline or making themselves regulars at the charity shops at Warwick Way while he looks for items — a microwave, some linens, a … few corkscrews— that might make the storage room more hospitable. Since it’s right there anyway, they even play tourist some days, going to all the spots in Westminster that he hasn’t been to since he was in primary school.

Work and weekends sorted, all Martin has to do is contend with the actual day to day of living at work, especially when his workplace holds statements and artefacts of all types of horror and the active feeling of a dozen eyes on you at all hours. Martin doesn’t mind that one as much, after two weeks of honestly not knowing if he’d ever see or be seen by anybody but Evangeline, being constantly perceived is as much a balm as it is a disturbance. It’s more the shadows and all the dark spaces Martin has to contend with. 

Evangeline legitimately will not cross anywhere too dark, even though she has better night vision than Martin, so he buys her a headlamp on one of their visits to the shops, but also does everything he can to minimize the darkness. With the new microwave in their room, they can go a day or two without heading upstairs to use the kitchenette in the break room and Jon agrees to keep the lights on permanently so even on midnight toilet trips, it’s only dark when they pass the Archives proper. Jon talks to Elias about switching the lights there from motion sensor to manual, but as usual, it’s a mess of bureaucratic red tape.

Showering is always an ordeal, it is Artefact Storage after all, but after sponge baths in front of his sink, Martin is just so thankful for the continuous hot water he can almost pretend that outside the confines of the shower curtain it’s just a normal bathroom. Evangeline keeps watch, for errant researchers and monsters alike, and that helps too.

All in all, life isn’t better now that he’s living in the Archives, but it certainly isn’t worse. And then Sasha shows up on a Saturday night, shaken and clutching Robin to her chest, blood spilled all down her left arm.

Martin had been dozing off, ___Planet Earth___ still playing on his laptop and Evangeline is invested enough that he can’t truly sleep when they both hear the knock on the door. Martin is wide awake instantly, his heart fallen somewhere past his stomach and he and Evangeline wait without moving to see if it comes again. There’s silence, while Martin prays the room is as sealed as Jon said it was, and then it's there again, accompanied by a sharp tapping. Martin shifts a bit, the panic slightly lessened by the new sound, but still ready to go into full alarm mode if it Jane Prentiss in the window, but even with just the blue light from his laptop screen, he can make out Sasha’s tortoise shell glasses and Robin’s beak as he taps again.

Martin still has a kitchen knife in one hand as he throws open the door for them.

“Sasha, what’s wrong?” Martin asks. 

With the hand not around Robin, Sasha reaches up to touch at her shoulder and is surprised to see her fingers come away wet.

“I think you should call Jon,” she says, voice high and wavering.

“Right, right. Why don’t you sit down and I’ll get that sorted.” 

Evangeline moves out of the way to let them in and then is right back, hovering, while Sasha sits down on the couch and pets Robin, mumbling soft reassurances to him. Martin calls Jon and swallows deeply when he finally answers.

“Martin,” Jon says, voice thick with sleep. “What is it?”

“It’s Sasha, she’s— ”

“Is she hurt?” Jon asks sharply. Martin hears the sheets rustle and Octavia’s voice, not any distinct words, but the shape of her concern as she says something to Jon.

“No. Well, yes, but I don’t think it’s bad. I haven’t taken a look at it yet.”

“What happened Martin?” Jon says his name particularly hard, as if whatever happened to Sasha is his fault.

“I don’t know! She said to call you. I— ”

“Fine, I’m on my way.” And with that, he hangs up.

Martin calls Tim next — “Stoker residence” Marisha answers cheerfully, before the sounds of a struggle and Tim comes through— and has a similar conversation full of “I don’t know”s before he decides to head over too.

Calls made, Martin is free to look at her shoulder— a clean cut, but long and deep, that thankfully starts to clot when Martin holds a towel to the wound. He makes tea on the hotplate, not as good as he can make in the break room upstairs, but it will do. 

“On the bright side, I don’t think you’ll need stitches,” he tells her as he hands her a mug. Already she looks more herself, the wide eyed, manic stare has calmed down and she’s finally let go of Robin, though he hasn’t gone far, just to the back of the couch.

“Thanks. I’m sorry for all this.” A sip of tea and she’s beginning to lose the grey pallor to her face.

“Was it Prentiss?” Martin asks after she’s finished half a cup and her color has mostly returned.

“Timothy Hodge,” she answers with a wince. “And… someone else, someone we haven’t dealt with yet, at least I don't think so.”

Martin takes a sip of his own tea to stall, so he doesn’t ask what’s on his mind, but Evangeline doesn’t follow his hesitation. 

“Was he alive? Timothy Hodge?” she whispers. 

“I… don’t know. He was trying to say something, but… he couldn’t have been,” Sasha answers. Robin hops from the back of the couch to Sasha’s lap and Evangeline too, inches back until she’s up against Martin, like they both need an anchor for the next part. Timothy’s daemon had been a goat; it had been filled out on his identification at the top of the statement. Clarice wasn’t something small that could have been hidden away in his pocket or even a bird or climbing animal, somewhere above. If Sasha had seen Timothy Hodge, she should have seen Clarice.

He asks anyway.

“Did you see his daemon?”

Sasha shakes her head.

Martin is cut off from having to say anything else by Jon’s voice calling out for them, but he isn’t sure what he’d say anyway. A human without a daemon is as common a trope in horror as a vampire or werewolf. They have hundreds of statements of humans without daemons, daemons without humans, or pairs who’s bond could stretch for miles, but out of those, the real statements were few and far between. Some of the statements they’d worked recently had some oddities— Naomi Hearne swore every member of the Lukas family ___had___ a daemon, but she couldn’t remember any of the forms, Lee Rentoul had said there was something wrong with Paul Noriega’s daemon when he went to kill him— but those aspects could never be corroborated and it wasn’t the same as first hand knowledge. 

For the entire time Sasha gives her statement, Martin sits at his desk with Evangeline huddled under the desk, against his legs, as close as she can get without being in his lap— which doesn’t work, they’ve broken an office chair testing that out. Tim, who arrives not long after Jon, is sat at his desk as well, seat swiveled around to face Jon’s office, but Marisha is restless and doing her best approximation of pacing the office back and forth, which is swinging from any perch she can. Tim catches her at one point while she passes over his desk, and pulls her into him, laughing all the while. 

“You’re stressing me out,” he complains, but Marisha nips at his arm and he lets her go again. 

“I don’t know where she gets that energy,” Tim says as if his foot isn’t tapping anxiously against the ground.

Martin mutters something small, non-committal. Until the Archives, he doesn’t even know if he was on a named basis with any daemons in his life besides his mother’s. He doesn’t really know the etiquette.

“This is really fucked up, you know,” Tim says after some time. “It was fucked up when it happened to you, don’t get me wrong, but you, at least, were somewhat looking for it but Sasha… she said whatever it was showed up at her flat?”

“Her building,” Martin amends.

“Still, that’s way too close for comfort,” Tim mutters darkly. He glares at Jon’s door for a while as Marisha leaps from one filing cabinet to another, before she gets to the first row of the Archives and the bond is stretched and then she’s headed back their way. Martin can feel the mix of fear and anger that radiates off Tim and isn’t surprised when he turns back to Martin. 

“I’m gonna try to get Sasha to quit; you want to join the pledge?” 

Martin sputters, not expecting that reaction. “What? No! No, I like my job. It’s fine— ”

“It really isn’t.”

“It’s... like you said, I went looking for it. And yes, I have to live in the Archives now but once we find Prentiss’s statement— ”

“We’ll do what? She killed seven hospital staff.”

Martin doesn’t correct him that the seventh death had been indirectly caused by Prentiss. “We’ll find some way to detain or stop her. Sasha said that ___thing___ helped her kill some worms tonight anyway.”

“We haven’t even been here a year and already two people have been attacked. How do you think Gertrude Robinson managed so long?” Tim asks. 

From the handful of times Martin’s met her in the library, Gertrude had been perfectly kind and unobtrusive, never showing much annoyance if they couldn’t locate the book or resource she was looking for. Her pigeon daemon— Hannibal, Martin remembers distinctly because she had joked about _Silence of the Lambs_ — had been just as kind as her, though a bit quiet and never spoke much to Evangeline or any of the other assistant’s daemons. Definitely the type to leave the Archives in such disarray, but not necessarily the kind to have dodged worm monsters and whatever Sasha saw tonight. 

“She was… pretty normal, all things considered,” Martin finally answers. He doesn’t tell Tim that the reason he’d seen her so often in the library for the later years he worked there is because all her assistants left, each abruptly it would seem, in the first few years Martin worked for the library.

“I wish she would have left a manual behind or something.” 

Martin’s heard the same sentiment from Jon. 

They lapse into silence after that, and it’s not long until Sasha is exiting Jon’s office, laughing at their solemnity.

“Guys, it’s ___fine___. I was in shock a bit earlier, but it really wasn’t anything that bad,” Robin flies out of Jon’s office from behind her, landing on Tim’s desk. Marisha is on him in no time, finally staying still long enough to hug Robin to her tightly.

“Sasha, if you want the couch tonight— ” Martin begins. 

“No, no. I’m not taking your bed. I’ll be fine at Tim’s,” Sasha says with a certainty in her voice that Martin tries not to envy. Tim had gotten here not long after Jon, but he and Sasha didn’t have any real time to speak to themselves, especially with Jon and Martin in the room, but there’s no hesitancy or question when she states she’s staying with Tim, it’s just a known fact.

They leave, Sasha in Tim’s jacket as hers is now discarded in it’s own bag, waiting by the stairwell door to go out to the bin when the sun rises, but Jon makes no move to follow them.

Martin gets up from his seat to peak his head into Jon’s office and he’s sat behind his desk, forehead resting against his steepled fingers. 

“You should probably listen to the tape as soon as possible,” Jon says, when he notices Martin at the door.

“Right.” Martin takes a few steps in and holds out his hand for the tape recorder.

Jon looks at his outstretched hand in suspicion, the look only furthering when he makes eye contact with Martin.

“The tape?”

“Oh,” Jon says. “I don’t mean tonight. You should go back to sleep.”

“So should you,” Martin counters. 

Jon has either accepted Martin’s stubbornness or has no energy to fight it. “Very well. We should get back to looking for Prentiss’s statement.” He pushes off his desk with a groan. 

“Sounds good. Do you want something to eat? I had an early dinner and I doubt I’ll make it to breakfast.”

Jon grunts, though Martin can’t decipher if it’s in agreement or not. He’ll go with agreement. Evangeline follows behind as they walk back towards the Archives, while Octavia crawls along the wall on Jon’s side at roughly eye level. 

“I’m thinking pizza. I know a good 24 hour place.”

“I don’t think good belongs in a sentence with 24 hours,” Jon says, disdain dripping from every syllable. 

“It’s pizza. It’s impossible to be bad.”

“They’d find a way,” Jon assures.

Martin scoffs but orders two pizzas anyway, corn, olives, and ham for Jon and a vegetarian for himself, and despite the night’s events, doesn’t feel too worried when he steps out with Evangeline to pick up their order, but he does bring along an extinguisher, just in case. And, on second thought, a corkscrew in his pocket. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I can't believe I've forgot this for multiple chapters. I mentioned I picked Evangeline before I decided on the horror naming convention, her name was taken from the poem, by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, which also gives the fic it's title. It's a huge cultural name where I live in southern Louisiana, but it's not overtly French (in fact, I doubt it was really widely used before the poem). 
> 
> Gertrude's daemon is a pigeon, not the most common bird to be associated with intelligence, but still very smart, which I thought fit Gertrude well. Hannibal is my favorite tv show and I wanted some way to honor that in the fic, but Thomas (the writer of the books) and Bryan (the showrunner) are just too common of names. I think Gertrude's daemon would find it a bit amusing to share his name with such a well known (perhaps the most well known) fictional serial killer. 
> 
> Finally, I meant to say this last chapter, but I just couldn't see the Institute having a shower anywhere, it's a small building only holding the Institute, not a large office building where you might find a locker room or something, and I couldn't see Martin going to Jon, Tim, or Sasha's homes every other day or so to shower, and if he rented a room at a hotel, that would raise the question of why TMI wasn't just comping a hotel stay anyway. So an emergency shower in Artefact Storage solved that as well as added a creepy vibe to AS that I'm sure Elias enjoys. 
> 
> Thanks for reading and reviewing! I'm on tumblr as suchakidder!


	5. Chapter 5

Sometimes, statement givers meet strangers with weird or missing daemons, and sometimes, statement givers encounter something that causes their daemon to act strangely. Martin spends the entire day after Sasha’s late night appearance pulling out most of the taped statements and research to look for threads, and this is all he’s collected.

“They’ll give us the paranormal Nobel Prize for this.” Martin’s got it all laid out over his desk and spilling onto Sasha’s. They just need some red string to complete the look of a full blown conspiracy theory.

Evangeline huffs in agreeance, or what might be annoyance. They didn’t sleep much last night— even with the pizza and the adrenaline rush from Sasha’s visit, Martin started to blink back to sleep after only an hour or so of sorting through files with Jon. Still, that had been nearly two, and Martin had jolted awake from a nightmare sometimes around sunrise, though it had been impossible to tell in their little room. Evangeline’s been in her bed at his desk most of the day, groaning anytime he had to head back to the Archives to grab a new file. 

“Not all of them are even significant though,” she says, a whine creeping into her voice. “Like Nathan, his daemon was just as scared of the angler-fish thing as he was.”

“I know, Evie, I was being sarcastic.”

“Should we tell Jon?” Evangeline asks, though Martin knows the real question is can she tell Octavia? 

“Can you imagine Jon’s face when we tell him we messed up his diligent organizing because some of the daemons in some of the statements felt off?”

“I suppose you’re right.” She slumps back into her bed. 

Martin glances at the clock. The statements pull at him, this thread he knows it there, even if he hasn’t quite found the right connections. It had been the desire to get to Sasha’s statement that had kept him up this morning, creeping in the back of his mind and crowding to the forefront anytime he’d finally started to doze off. But tomorrow is Monday and he has to eat and shower and get ready for the work week and, most time-consuming, return all the files back to the proper place in the Archives and Martin is pretty sure he’ll have to do that last task alone.

“No hands,” Evangeline boasts when he asks her, confirming his thoughts. Not everyone can be as lucky as Tim to have a daemon with a form like Marisha.

“I’m going to build you a pull wagon harness,” Martin tells her on his second trip back from replacing files. She’s pulled her bed over to the midway point between Martin’s desk and the Archives, and at his threat, she snorts and rolls over. 

It’s only nine when Martin collapses onto the couch, narrowly missing Evangeline, but even the hazy web of connections he can’t quite get out of his mind aren’t enough to keep him awake long.

The next morning, Martin is expecting to hear the flap of wings when the door to the office opens at nine, but it’s just Tim and Marisha, and it takes Martin till nearly half past to stop waiting on Sasha and remember she’s not coming in today.

“How’s Sasha?” 

“Terrible patient. She took my best joggers, hogs the covers, threw out half my cupboard.”

“Why?” Martin asks, to focus on something other than Sasha and Tim sharing a bed. He’s never quite sure what they’re relationship is, feels a bit like it's all some big joke he’ll get laughed at for seriously believing.

“‘Expiration dates’” Tim and Marisha both do the air quotes for that one.

The next few days are quieter than normal. Martin likes Tim, he really does, but there’s a lot more than just his and Sasha’s relationship that Tim treats with the same, casual nature, and Martin can never be quite sure if he’s in on the joke or not. And on the rare occasion Tim is actually serious, which Martin had really only seen Saturday night, there’s an anger and cynicism in him that Martin has never known how to handle. 

Jon is as normal as ever, assigning or checking up on research, asking more questions Martin can’t answer about Jane Prentiss. He’s still coming early, though Martin’s still working on catching up for the weekend’s lack of sleep, Evangeline is stubbornly seeing to that, and he doesn’t get to work (ha, he lives at work) until 8:30 for most of the beginning of the week. 

Sasha returns Thursday morning, walking in with Tim to little fanfare. 

Robin and Marisha, despite now living together, it would seem, still have just as much to talk about and Martin realizes the background noise of their chatter had been just as constant as the buzz of the fluorescent light, an absence he’d noted but hadn’t been able to place until now. Martin is happy for the Archives to return to their normal status quo, but it’s not until he’s coming back from lunch with Sasha that he realizes another advantage of her return to work.

They’d gone to the little sandwich shop a few blocks over. Martin hadn't left the Institute since a quick Tesco run Monday night so he was quick to suggest going for takeout when Sasha asked if he wanted lunch. It’s the two of them— Tim is wooing some witness somewhere and Jon’s only response to Martin’s extended invitation had been to lower one eyebrow at him— and they ate their sandwiches on a bench overlooking the river while they kept the talk light. 

“It’s all my fault, really.” Sasha rubs a bit of hand-sani into her hands as they begin walking back. 

Robin always flies ahead when Sasha walks, as far as the bond will let him, and waits on a suitable perch--lamp posts, benches, a bin lid if he’s desperate— until she gets close enough that he can take off again. They’ve had a longer bond as long as Martin’s known them, at least a dozen yards or so, but not quite long enough that Robin can fly all the way back to the Institute. 

“I could just _buy_ something, you know, an outfit or two to tide me over until I’m ready to go back to my apartment, but I’m trying to not give myself that out. Like, if I have any clothes at Tim’s, I’ll keep stalling going back and it’s not like I can wear Tim’s pajamas to work.”

“So what did you do?” Martin looks over at her, in trousers and a jumper that are pretty obviously not Tim’s pajamas. The trousers could be from Saturday, it had been dark and Martin had other things to focus on than Sasha’s sartorial choices, but her shirt and jacket had both been torn.

“Found this in the back of Tim’s closet.” She tugs on the sleeve of the jumper, a bit oversized even for Sasha’s height. “He said it’s his mum’s but as she’s only got a couple inches on Evangeline, I’m thinking it’s probably an ex’s. I’m just lucky my hairs in braids right now, or else-”

Sasha cuts off mid-sentence and throws out her arm instinctively, catching Martin in the chest. He stops, mid= step to look down at the ground in alarm, Evangeline barking at the sudden change, but there’s nothing but pavement under his foot. 

“What— “ he begins, but he hears Robin’s approach before he lands on the arm Sasha is now holding out for him. 

“There’s a few worms at the door.” The Institute is only a few buildings over, Martin can see the curved awning of the entryway and the heavy wooden doors. “I didn’t see anything else, but if we get closer, I can probably circle the whole building…”

The Institute is not a huge building, but Martin isn’t so sure Robin can make it all the way around, and doesn’t want to put Sasha through that pain when it’s hopefully, just a few worms.

Sasha agrees. “We can probably handle a few?” 

They all but run to the doors of the Institute, where it really is only a couple worms they are easily able to crush underfoot while Robin circles the immediate vicinity to make sure there’s nothing else lurking. Still, Martin can’t truly relax until they’ve made it to the Archives, with the door to the entrance hallway securely shut and the fire extinguisher in sight. Sasha too, lets all of the tension, collapsing into her seat with a weary laugh. 

“We’re a bit of a mess, aren’t we?” Sasha laughs as she reaches forward to stroke the feathers down Robin’s back. They stop again, at the sound of feet in the hallway, but it’s only Tim, who walks into their laughter. 

There’s been one sighting before, a single worm, dried up and dead, along the wall in the back with the bins, but there’s been a few scares where Martin would see a flash of silver out of the corner of his eye or Evangeline would catch the whiff of that musty, rotted smell. He would try not to let the panic rise to his throat while Tim and Sasha did their best not to let their annoyance show as they lost another twenty minutes scouring the archives, or the breakroom, or once, the dive bar they’d gone to for drinks Martin’s second week of living in the archives. No one ever said anything negative, at least not to Martin, but Tim did start pestering Jon to pester Elias about getting an exterminator. 

But now, Martin is out of breath, leaning hard on his desk and Sasha has a smile that’s more of a grimace as they tell Tim what happened, because Sasha _gets it_. 

Martin isn’t happy she was attacked. Happy is far too strong a sentiment for something so dangerous and Martin would never wish that on his co-worker, much less one he likes as much as Sasha, but it is nice to have someone who understands and soon, it becomes a necessity. It goes from a few worms at the main doors, to a few dozen that weekend and then even more, at all entrances, by the end of the following week. 

Through this all, they still have to work, as Jon is sure to remind them, and it’s two weeks after Sasha gives her statement that the Archives sees another live statement, though with none of the franticness of the previous two’s “just escaped from death” energy. And none of Naomi Hearne’s calm resolve. 

Martin meets Melanie King at Rosie’s desk, a short, rail-thin young woman has chunky sections of aqua blue hair framing her face. She all but vibrates with restless energy, even standing still, a stark contrast to her daemon, a large tortoise who introduces himself to Evangeline as “Flea”.

“Oh.” Martin looks down at Flea, who must weigh at least a few stones and is nearly as long as Evangeline, though with none of her dexterity with his scaled, curving legs and stumpy feet. “We can use one of the ground floor offices. Our elevator is….”

“Haunted?” Melanie asks, eyebrows disappearing up behind her fringe.

“No! It’s not haunted, no! It’s just old.” And quite possibly haunted.

“I’ll have to come back and do an episode on it, then.” Melanie begins to unstrap what Martin had assumed was a back pack but is actually something akin to a modified baby carrier and she efficiently and gracefully straps Flea to her back in what must be accustomed ease. “Now, I'm ready for where you need to take me without the ‘spooky elevator’. 

Martin and Melanie chat about her youtube channel while they walk. Martin’s never heard of “Ghost Hunt UK’ — he gets enough of the supernatural at work, even when he was still working in the Library, that he tries not to associate with it at home— but he promises he’ll give it a watch.

“You know you don’t _have_ to,” Melanie says as they round the corner in the stairwell and descend the last few steps to the basement. “‘I’m not watching your youtube’ is a valid answer and is way nicer than some I’ve gotten.”

“No, no, I’m sure it’s really fun.” Martin is spared from continuing on with his word vomit once they arrive at the office in the entry hall, commonly used for giving statements, where Jon is waiting.

Martin and Evangeline are nonetheless stuck there, Jon and Melanie and their daemons between them and the doorway into the Archives. Though, as Martin watches them exchange introductions, he doesn’t notice Octavia. She’s unsociable at the best of times, but she’s usually beholden to the social norms of greeting someone’s daemon. Martin looks down at Evangeline, who flicks her eyes up at the ceiling, directly above the group.

“Jesus.” Melanie has caught sight of Octavia now.

Jon sighs and looks up directly above him. “This is Octavia,” he finally says when it looks like she won’t say it herself.

“Flea.” The tortoise tilts his head at her. 

“Flea?” Jon asks dismissively.

“Mephistopheles is kinda a mouthful.”

“Ah.” Octavia has finally decided to join the conversation. “The demon in _Faust?”_

Melanie gives Jon a wry look. “You two must be cats fans.”

Martin’s only seen the look currently on Jon’s face once, when Tim called Dante’s _Inferno_ fanfiction. Martin is ready to step in and intercede, but Jon takes a deep breath and regains his composure.

“Let’s begin the statement, Miss King.”

Jon opens the door for them, keeping it open once Melanie and Flea file in for Octavia to scitter across the ceiling and down the doorway to Jon’s shoulder.

“Martin?” He asks, only just realizing he’s there. “Do you have something else?”

Martin takes the dismissal and hurries back to the Archives where Sasha and Tim are waiting.

“We don’t get live ones down here often.” Tim physically cannot sit properly in his chair and is slouched low, feet up on the edge of Sasha’s desk. Marisha is sat on his chest, scrolling through his phone.

“You sound like a predator, Tim.” Sasha pokes at the sole of his boots with the end of her pencil, but gives Martin an equally curious look. 

“So… what were they like?” Robin prompts.

“Either she’s going to eat him alive or it ends in a screaming row.”

It’s not screaming but they all hear Melanie’s exit clear enough when the office door swings open violently and she stomps out. Sasha, a Ghost Hunt UK fan, had volunteered to escort Melanie back out, and she grimaces while she stands up to head over. Marisha wishes them good luck.

“You two have to deal with Jon,” Robin says before flying to Sasha and through the hallway door she’s holding open. 

Jon does not stomp, he’s too dignified for that, but he does cross through the workspace like a mini-rainstorm, dark and brooding, shoulders hunched high under his tweed coat. Luckily, neither Tim or Martin are caught in his wake, as Jon enters his office without more than a nod at them, and does _not_ slam the door shut behind him, it just swings closed naturally. And loudly.

Martin can only suppress the urge so long, and he and Evangeline are at Jon’s door with tea within an hour.

Martin knocks, then tries the door. Jon rarely bothers to answer a knock, so only a locked door will stop Martin from entering. The door is unlocked, so Martin opens it slowly, stepping into Jon’s office carefully.

Jon’s desk is as crowded as always, precarious stacks of files that Jon swears are organized taking up most of the surface. Jon doesn’t tend to play music, but it's on today, classical, and he’s pushed back from the desk while Octavia spins a web between the top two shelves of his bookcase. His office chair is large and high backed and already towers of Jon on a normal day, but now Jon’s hunched forward, resting his head in his hands, absolutely dwarfed by the tufted brown leather behind him. 

“I brought you some tea,” Martin gently announces. 

“Yes, showing up with a teacup tends to lead to that conclusion.” Jon doesn’t move or even lift up his head as Martin sets the dish down on some of the only unoccupied space on the desk.

“Do you need help with anything? I can begin working on the supplemental notes?”

“Yes, you might as well.” Jon sighs and rolls his chair forward to reach the desk. He’s masterful at talking while not looking at you, and goes about collecting papers for Martin. “We shouldn’t need to do much research on Cambridge Military Hospital, as it’s already been heavily documented by shows such as Ms. King’s. However, her filming assistant, Sarah Baldwin will need vetting. The name sounds… familiar somewhere, i--:”

“She was taken by the anglerfish.” Martin says before he even knows he’s going to respond. 

Jon stills and looks up at Martin for the first time since he’s entered his office. “What?”

“Or she went missing from the area. From the first statement.”

“Right, right. That’s… that’s very good recall Martin.”

Martin doesn’t know if he’s ever received a compliment from Jon. It doesn’t stop him from trying to refute it. “Oh it’s not really, I don’t just have every name from every statement floating in my head. I was just looking at that file.” 

Evangeline jabs her nose into a thigh, a welcome distraction as Martin would have continued on. 

“You were looking at Nathan Watts’s file? Why?”

“I’ve been looking over the statements for mentions of daemons. You know, since Prentiss and Michael didn’t seem to have one, or… I haven’t really found much. I mean, I’ve found a lot, but I don’t know if there’s a connection. There’s so many…”

Martin doesn’t know why he has the pathological need to fill the silence— no one brings it out of him like Jon and his expectant looks and artfully raised eyebrow— but he does know he’ll keep talking if he’s not stopped and he’s hoping it’s Evangeline’s snout again, but Jon actually stops him this time, with words he wasn’t expecting.

“I’ve been looking into it as well. After Sasha said looking at Michael’s daemon was something like trying to close your eyes and focus on the afterimages of the light, I began to sense a theme.”

“Oh.” Martin doesn’t know what to say. “Was there something off with Sarah Baldwin’s daemon then?”

“Actually…” Jon doesn’t verbalize whatever conclusion he comes to after that actually, but he does sigh again, and brings a hand up to his temple to rub at his hairline. “I guess I really do have to call Georgie.”

“Um…” It’s not like Martin has encyclopedic knowledge of all of their connections through the Institute,but he doesn’t remember a Georgie. 

“Ms. King was referred to Sarah Baldwin by Georgie Barker, a podcaster who shares Ms. King’s interest in the paranormal.”

“I could call? If it's going to bother you. Or Tim, you know he has a way with talking to people.”

“Oh no, Georgie, Ms. Barker, would never let me hear the end of it. We were… friends, in Uni.”

“Oh… that’s…” Martin can’t picture Jon at Uni--Oxford, he’s pretty sure. It’s hard enough to picture Jon as anything other than head archivist, arching an eyebrow over his thick-rimmed glasses. “That’s funny that both of you would end up working in the paranormal. Were you— I mean you must have been into it right? Not that that’s bad, I work here after all, but I— “

“Martin.” Jon has a way of turning his name into a command.

“Right. Well, erhm, do you want to collaborate then? On this daemon thing?”

After that, Jon and Martin’s after hours work is primarily on the “daemon thing” project. It takes about a week to go through all their collected research on the statements, and then they can turn to actual daemon studies, a subject much more accepted in academia than the esoteric— less of a fringe science and more philosophy meets biology. They have access to plenty of databases through Institute credentials and Sasha gets them into the ones they can’t without even asking why Jon might need access to biological databases. 

Jon ends up staying later and later after work as the summer slowly meanders its way to London, full of false starts that have Martin thinking he can finally ditch the heavy pullovers and jumpers taken from his flat in March. Even with the odd cold front, Martin needs lighter layers, so he takes a trip to Stockwell one Saturday. Evangeline still can’t come in, but she manages to make it to the doorway to his flat, and the pull at their bond only really starts to ache at the furthest corners. 

It’s funny, or maybe sad, that he feels safer at the Archives, where worms are a daily occurrence, than at his flat, but at least at the Archives, they have protections— the sealed storage room, the extinguishers Martin’s appropriated from the other departments, Tim and Jon and Sasha. Something is coming, that feels inevitable, and Martin doesn’t feel safe, per say, but safer.

One morning, before work but not ridiculously early, Martin enters Jon’s office with tea and two scones.

“I do not know why the hive chose me, but it did. And I think that it always had. The song is loud and beautiful and I am so tired of the quiet. There is a wasps’ nest in my attic. Perhaps it can soothe our itching soul.”

Martin usually makes his presence known, even if Jon’s recording, but there’s something, the curiosity inside of him, or the lull of Jon’s voice, that has his lips clamped shut while he listens to the end of the statement. 

Jon finishes and lingers in the moment— Martin has heard the statements, the voices, but he’s never known how physical it is, how little Jon looks like himself— before he blinks out of it and slumps back into his chair.

“Hello,” Octavia is dangling from a web, only a meter or so from Martin’s face, surely not there a moment ago. It snaps both him and Jon to attention. 

“Was that?” Martin doesn’t know how he knows.

“Jane Prentiss’s statement? Yes, I found it some time late last night. Or early this morning.”

“Did... What did she say?” Though finding it has been their goal, Martin has had doubts, small, private doubts he hasn’t even voiced to Evangeline, that the statement held any hope for them. 

“She… ah, she and her daemon were close before he settled and she wanted to be… closer.” 

Without waiting for Jon’s permission, Martin sets the tray with their breakfast down on top of the sturdiest looking stack, and sits down heavily in Jon’s wooden chair. “That’s… what does that mean?”

“‘Daemons weren’t meant to live outside you’.” Martin can tell he’s quoting the statement. He can see it, lying inconspicuously on Jon’s desk, next to the still running recorder.

“Did she eat…” Martin can’t say the next words.

“No. She let the worms eat him. And then they… consumed her.”

“Jon that’s insane! That’s— we should call someone!”

Jon finally sits up straight in his chair, looking tired and wrung out. “Over what? The words of someone who clearly lost touch with reality?”

“Jon! Her daemon was eaten by worms!”

“Not necessarily.”

“Jon— “

“If her daemon was a cat, as she claims— “ He gestures towards his desk. “— and we still haven’t found any documentation thanks to privacy laws, then yes, he doesn’t seem to have been present at her hospitalization or when she attacked you, but consumed by parasitic worms isn’t the _only_ explanation.”

“Are you talking about separation?” Evangeline whines at the word. It's come up in their research plenty; and there’s a reason it’s so rare. “Most people don’t even survive that! All these people we’ve been tracking, you think they’ve all just gone through separation?”

“We’re not talking about all of them, we’re talking about Jane Prentiss.” Jon says evenly. 

Martin finally deflates at that. “Why were we even looking for her statement then?” 

“I was hoping for something more conclusive as to _how_ she ended up in this state. You can listen or read if you’d like, but I’d like to lay down.”

Martin nods numbly and stands back up, surprised at the effort it takes him. The tray can stay— he’ll eat his scone later— and he stops in the doorway for one more look, Jon, eyes closed, head tipped back in his chair, Octavia spinning a large web on the ceiling. 

“This is very illuminating on her mental state,” Jon starts, eyes still closed. His hair is disheveled and loose from its daily set and falls down past his chin, “but as for answers, I was looking for them too.”

Martin closes the door softly behind him. 

In the next few weeks, the summer comes to meet them in full force. And then, so does Jane Prentiss.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Cliffhanger! With the Prentiss attack, we're nearing the end of this section of the story and Martin's POV (for now), so there should be only two chapters left. 
> 
> Melanie's daemon is a giant tortoise named Mephistopheles, which is the demon from Faust, but also, Mr. Mistoffelees of Cats. Melanie is ironically a fan and the day the Tom Hooper preview hit the internet was the best day of her life. Jon is unironically a fan and cried when he saw the preview. Flea is a tortoise because Melanie says eff the idea that only cats and dogs and ferrets and such can be cuddly daemons, and also, because eff the idea she's letting anything slow her down. I am pretty sure you shouldn't hold a tortoise upright like Flea is in his carrier, but daemons don't have the same physicality as real animals.
> 
> Jane Prentiss's statement was pretty much the same as the show, with the loneliness she talks about exacerbated by the fact she's lost connection to her daemon, but I'll go into more details in the next chapters.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> With your parent's daemons essentially being like another set of parents, it's double the abandonment issues and emotional abuse! I've added quite a few tags for this chapter, so mind those as it's gets a bit rough. I should have had worms tagged the whole time, but I only just thought of that so oh well.

The first time Evangeline takes the form of a mouse, Martin looks at her little form, curled up in a grey, fluffy ball in the palm of his hand and feels relief. It can’t have _really_ been the first time, a mouse is the most instinctive form for a daemon to assume when frightened in a child’s first few years, but Martin doesn’t remember those ever seeing her like this. He’s six years old and looking at her beady little eyes and twitching nose and there’s a shared feeling that they are, for once, completely in sync. And then, with a finger held up a finger over his lips, he carefully puts her in his pocket and wedges himself between two pillars.

They are somewhere far away from home, somewhere near the coast, probably on holiday, because there are children and families everywhere. His parents had set up a blanket further back from the shore but they’d let him go to play park near the water, a great wooden structure that looks like driftwood rising from the sand to form turrets and platforms and bridges and all types of hidden corners, perfect for hide and seek.

Even as a child— Martin has to be small in this memory, his dad is still there— Martin and Evangeline weren’t very good at the game. Martin wasn’t imaginative or brave enough for the truly good hiding spots, so nestled and burrowed into whatever the playscape was that you might never truly be found, and besides, Evangeline liked to be a dog most of the time, a St. Bernard like Chloe, if she could get the form right, or a retriever or some other breed, when the pattern and heavy coat were too hard for her. Most hiding spots, even the mediocre ones, were just too small for them. 

But that day, he isn’t playing with schoolmates who know he is too easy a target to make the game enjoyable. The sea-side park has children from all over the country, and somehow, a few of those children had formed a little gang that Martin, for once, isn’t on the outside of. 

“We have to be sneaky, all right?” Martin had whispered to Evangeline, when the leader of their group called go and “it” started counting.

He had been expecting her to be a cat or a bluebird or one of her usual forms, but she becomes a mouse and runs up his leg just like in the nursery rhyme, and Martin just knows this time they won’t be found first.

Later, once his dad is gone, Evangeline wouldn’t want to be found, but for other reasons. Martin couldn’t help it. He could hunch his shoulders and sit in the back of the classroom and get through school as unnoticed as possible, but at home it was just him and any time he was too loud or put the wrong thing in the microwave or forgot his school bag in the parlor or was just too much, it was always when his mother was trying to sleep or feeling ill. When Evangeline was a mouse, she could stay safe inside his pocket, or right inside his sleeve or collar, and be one less target for his mother and Klemens’ scorn and disdain. 

Evangeline had plenty of other forms she liked. She never shook her instinct to change into a goose occasionally, even though Klemens was long past finding her waddling after him to be charming. During lessons at school, she liked to be a toad and sit on the corner of Martin’s desk. When they watched telly or read books, she liked to change into her favorite daemon character, and like every child at the time, she loved to be a snowy owl like Hedwig. Sometimes when she had been really playful or giddy, she would be a rat terrier or a poodle, or even a golden retriever, but never a St. Bernard. Martin liked them all— aside from when she’d be a carpenter ant and crawled around his skin to bother him— and told himself to be happy no matter what form she would take when settled.

When he is a few weeks away from turning fourteen, Martin is at the kitchen table sorting through the mail— the latest of his responsibilities after he found they were three months late on their house note— and Evangeline still hasn’t settled. It doesn't bother him; roughly half of his classmates have settled daemons, but half don’t. Evangeline is a grey field mouse most of the time, might hold the form for days, but they both can tell it’s not her final form. 

That day, she’s a shorthair cat, British blue, and curled up on his feet while he works. He registers that the weight on his feet is suddenly heavier and he feels her get up, but he’s too busy trying to swallow around the well of panic that’s risen in his throat as he looks at the amount due for a recent screening at the clinic for his mother. It’s not until she noses at his unoccupied hand and he catches a glimpse of her face, her eyes large and round, above a wet black snout and droopy mouth, that he pays Evangeline any attention. He nearly screams.

“Cut that out,” he demands in a whisper instead. “Mum’s going to…”

But it hits him then, the only reason Evangeline would change her form to a St. Bernard. The desperation in her eyes says enough. 

“I’m so so so sorry Martin. I didn’t do it on purpose. I keep trying-”

But Martin knows as well as she does— she’ll never take another form. Whatever all the BBC dramas had said, there’s no pride or amazement or wonder in his heart when he takes in Evangeline’s form. His heart is a leaden weight, sinking deeper into his gut with every second. She couldn’t have settled as any other type of dog? Any other breed? 

Evangeline’s not a mirror image of his dad’s daemon: her eyes are warm brown, and her brindle is a brighter, russet brown than Chloe’s deep chestnut color, and only on her face and her back, but there’s still so much that’s alike. If Martin ran his fingers through her fur, he’s sure it’d even feel the same as Chloe’s, a feeling Martin hasn’t forgotten even as his father’s face or the sound of Chloe’s voice have started to fade.

Evangeline is desperately pushing against his hand and his side. “Please say something Martin, I’m sorry. I’m so— “

“I know!” He snaps and then immediately regrets it when she shrinks away like she’s been struck. Martin is off the chair and onto the floor, half under the table with her, and he wraps his arms around her and she comes to him easily, nosing at his neck and digging her paws uselessly into his chest. Martin takes a moment to mourn that she’ll never be small enough to burrow under his clothes or sleep over his heart. There’s so many things she’ll never be able to do again. 

“It’s alright, it’s not that bad.” 

Evangeline is whimpering against his skin and then she’s whispering a fear Martin hasn’t even let himself voice. 

“She wouldn’t.” Martin hopes his voice gives off a conviction he’s not actually feeling. “Who else would take care of her?”

“Mrs. Hulusi next door.” 

Martin tightens his arms around her. “Mum won’t kick us out, Evie.”

For the next two days, when he’s not at school, Martin only leaves his room to tend to his mum and for two scheduled toilet breaks. Evangeline stays in the hall when he enters his mother’s room, even when it stretches their bond painfully. But they both know it can’t last forever. Evangeline is Martin, and she’s too large to hide.

“We could run away,” she whispers on the second night, sometime late into the night, far later than they should be awake to wake up for school the next morning. Martin pretends to be asleep. It’s the most reoccurring solution that’s come to him in the past two days.

Finally, the next morning Martin is ambling down the hall to the kitchen, still half-asleep, when he hears movement in the kitchen. With a palm up to keep Evangeline from advancing, he peaks around the corner. His mother is trying to light the hob and Klemens is halfway in the cupboard.

“Good morning.”

“You bought Tetley’s again,” Klemens answers, in lieu of greeting.

“Mum?”

Klemens is straining his neck further into the reaches of the cupboard like he might find a spare box of Twinings, or whatever brand they prefer this week, hiding somewhere in the back. With the flame finally on, his mother turns on the tap to fill the kettle.

Once the silence has stretched on for an agonizing little eternity, she turns to look at Martin. “Yes?”

“Evangeline’s settled.”

“Oh.” There’s no pride or joy in her eyes, there’s nothing much at all. “Alright.”

“She’s a… she’s just like dad’s. Like Chloe.” It’s the first time the name’s been spoken in their house in years.

The finally gets Klemens attention and he withdraws from the cupboard so quickly, two biscuit packets and a box of pasta fall out. Aside from that, the room is deafeningly still. His mother still has the kettle under the faucet—it’s overflowing and falling back into the sink over last night’s dishes.

“Evangeline,” Martin calls to her

Evangeline does her best to walk into the room, not slink in like she’s got something to be ashamed of, but her tail is between her legs and her ears are flat against her head anyway.

“That’s just bloody great, Martin,” his mother finally says. Klemens starts to laugh, a honking, ugly sound.

“Mum, I—“

“I shouldn’t be surprised; of course you two would do something like this.” The water is still running, but the noise is nearly deafened by Klemens’ laughter. Evangeline is cowering behind his legs, but Martin extends his hand forward instead, reaching for his mother. She hurries away from him, swinging the kettle out in front of her defensively.

“Get out of my sight.”

Martin takes a step towards her. “What?”

“Get the fuck out of my sight!”

The kettle arcs through the air, going wide enough that it’s easy to duck, but the water splashes him all the same. Next she grabs a mug, but Martin’s already down the hall with Evangeline when he hears it hit the wall and shatter.

So no, she doesn’t kick them out, but it takes her over six months to say another word to him, and she never looks at Evangeline if she can help it.

And Martin and Evangeline make it work, like they’ve made everything else work. They have to. They have nowhere else to go and no one else can look after his mother.

When Martin had been in primary school, some snotty kid had figured out his dad’s daemon however snotty kids got their gossip, and everyone at school had mocked them. Everyone knew dog daemons were for servants and lackeys and those who would rather fawn to follow a leader than be one; it was in all the books and the most common given example of a daemon stereotype. But Martin hadn’t cared, just like he didn’t care when they would tease Evangeline when she would crawl out of his pocket as a mouse. Daemon stereotypes were just that, and besides, his dad wasn’t like that at all.

Chloe settling as a dog had always seemed like a mistake to him. Chloe wasn’t a kiss-ass at all, she was big and strong , like his dad. Chloe rooted out the monsters under his bed at night after a bad dream and was his favorite pillow for movie nights. She could run faster than Martin but would never let him fall too far behind. Chloe was tough and sturdy and dependable. Until she wasn’t.

As Martin grows, he can see he was always right. Chloe had been a fluke, but Evangeline following in her footprints had been right.

It’s Evangeline who’s obsequious, who apologizes to all the sneering faces at school when they have to push their desks wider apart to let them pass.

It’s Evangeline who can’t move around the library without knocking something over, well into half a year of working there.

It’s Evangeline who excitedly takes a file from Jon with her teeth and then simpers through a lecture on professionality and hygiene.

It’s Evangeline who starts yipping the second they hear a shout from Jon’s office, who runs towards the door rather than from it when Jon and Sasha come rushing out screaming. It’s Evangeline who gets under foot when Martin hurries them along to the office storage, who stays at his side, ineffectually trying to get him up as he’s yelling at her to go on.

It’s hard to feel gratified once they get to the storage room and all his paranoia and preparation aren’t unfounded when there are a few worms burrowing under his skin. Jon has even more, there’s at least a dozen in his left leg alone, and Sasha has a few in her forearm. But it seems all the daemons came out unscathed at least, he hasn’t done a full pat down on Evangeline but she looks good. Terrified, but good.

“Well,” Sasha says through gritted teeth, a few minutes later, while she digs at the last worm out of her arm. “We—ah!—at least we know the worms are coming for us and our daemons indiscriminately this time.”

Martin grips Jon’s shin, right below the knee, with his left hand to keep him from moving as he maneuvers the corkscrew with his hastily bound right hand. Sasha had done Martin’s first, three worms tunneling their way up his right arm and one in the center of his palm, a squirming lump he could see under the skin, to free up his dominant hand before removing the worms in her own arm, leaving Martin to haul Jon’s left leg across his lap and get to work.

“Stop wiggling, you have only two more to go.”

Two completely submerged worms left, but Martin is not going to mention that part. Already Jon’s leg is looking a bit like swiss cheese, and there’s rivulets of blood running down his skin, onto Martin’s lap and the floor.

“Did you get the recorder on?” Aside from shouts and wails and one gripe on Martin’s extraction technique, Jon’s only opened his mouth to ask after the recorder. Priorities.

“No.” Sasha answers. “Been a bit busy pulling worms out of my arm!” As she says that, she pulls the final one out with a flourish, crushing it instantly in her palm before going to wipe it against the floor as no one’s had time to go for anything as extraneous as towels.

Jon, sitting on the floor of a storage room, with his trousers rolled up to the knee of his left leg as said leg bled into a co-workers lap, can barely look all that demanding but whatever Sasha sees in his expression causes her to groan and push to stand.

“Martin, you said the extra one was…”

“In my—in document storage. The cabinet—“ he uses the distraction to drive the corkscrew deep into the slim meat of Jon’s thigh, earning him a reproachful look from Jon, but at least the worm is firmly hooked “—next to the couch. First drawer. Oh, and the first aid kit.”

“And towels!” Evangeline calls over her shoulder.

Martin pulls the worm out with a sharp tug, having to hold down hard with his left hand. “You know, neither Sasha and I yelled this much.”

“Neither you or Sasha had as many, or as deep,” Jon mumbles bitterly. The first aid kit should have some paracetamol, though he’s not sure how much. Jon can take his share if need be

“Well, this is the last one.”

It’s not difficult, though Jon tenses and squirms each time Martin brings the corkscrew anywhere near his leg. He’s got Octavia clenched in his hand so tightly that Martin’s tense just watching, but he supposes she would say something if it hurt. She sighs when the last worm finally comes out, bloody and wriggling.

Task done, Martin feels the urge to say something obscenely sappy like “there, there”, or worse, offer to kiss it better, which wouldn’t even work as the multiple wounds are still open. Evangeline, plastered to Martin’s back and panting over his shoulder has enough sense to keep her sappy thoughts to herself as well and for that Martin can be thankful, even if he isn’t feeling all that charitable to her currently.

“Thank you. You were, ah, very prepared for all… this.” Jon says.

Martin is spared from having to reply by Sasha’s arrival, armed with towels and the first aid kid and, almost reluctantly, Martin’s spare recorder. Jon reaches for it first, of course, and visibly relaxes once the tape begins to whir. Octavia climbs out of his hand and sits on top of it, just like Martin had seen her do that first night he’d come in to give his statement.

Martin’s own wounds are bleeding sluggishly, so he tends to Jon’s first, careful to avoid reaching too close to Octavia.

“Can you see what’s—“ Jon hisses as Martin applies the antiseptic to the largest of the holes, where Martin had to root around to get to the buried worm. “—going on out there?”

Robin flies up to the perch on the thin lip of the window pane in the door. “They’re staying mostly in the work area.”

“How many?” Martin asks. What he’d seen had been an unfathomable amount, so many more than those that had been with Jane Prentiss in that basement.

“I don’t… thousands, I guess.”

“I don’t see the point in recording this—any of this.” Sasha had handed down the supplies to Martin and laid out a towel over the worst of the blood spots, but she hadn’t rejoined them on the floor. She’s standing over Jon, looking a bit like she’ll reach down and snatch the recorder out of his hands. Instead, she crosses her arms over her chest, tracing red lines of blood from her forearm across her white blouse.

“There’s something here. Something about the Archives and the statement’s we’ve been covering—the real statements. You can feel it, right?” Jon looks first to Sasha, who nods reluctantly, and then to Martin, though he must already know that answer. Martin’s been here with him every morning and into the nights and weekends, searching for whatever will tie this all up into a nice theory or narrative or anything that makes sense. “There’s a thread I can’t find and it’s leading deeper and deeper into something… Even if I can’t find it, I’d rather not end up a mystery like Gertrude Robinson.”

“Well, I guess you’ll get that final request sooner rather than later.”

Evangeline whines, but Martin doesn’t have a free hand to reach behind his back and pat her. “We won't— Jon you said Elias replaced the sprinkler system, so eventually the worms will get somebody’s notice and they’ll pull the alarm and…”

Jon snorts. “And if they stay localized to the Archives, how long do you think it will take for someone to not—”

“Tim!”

It’s a cacophony of voices after that, as three humans and their daemons try to get their most pertinent information across—“he’s at lunch” “there’s no signal” when suddenly Evangeline barks sharply.

“Email!” she pants. Octavia, at some point, had crossed over from Jon’s lap to the cabinet right by Evangeline, and Martin’s, head. “The internet still works.”

“Right.” Martin is off without another word to anyone, dashing down the path through the clutter with the plaster he had been about to apply to Jon’s leg still open in his hand. He doesn’t even stop when he gets to his room, just grabs the computer and pivots to race back. He can hear their voices again, and right as he rounds the corner and their makeshift A&E, he sees Sasha open the door.

Things get a bit tense after that: Martin finishes cleaning and wrapping up Jon’s wounds, Jon asks Martin if he’s a ghost, Martin emails Elias and gets the automated “out of office” response. Evangeline pouts silently at Martin’s side, trying to catch his eye so she can apologize but Martin puts her off. The fire alarm is triggered but not the sprinklers and something, or someone, is breaking through the wall. Martin didn’t think he’d die locked in a storage room with his boss and crush, brandishing a corkscrew as his only weapon, but at least he’s not alone.

But it’s only Marisha’s little face, white circles around her eyes floating in the darkness, soon followed by Tim’s face.

“So we’re going _where_ exactly?” Martin asks once they’ve been walking for at least ten minutes. Walking for ten minutes in the tunnels under his completely normal and regular workplace.

“Out. I figure there’s got to be an end somewhere, right?” Tim calls from behind.

Being the lead is an anxious position— Martin’s just waiting to turn the corner and have his torch cut across the tunnel to see Jane Prentiss or some other terror— but Jon yelped the first time he tried to put his full weight onto his left leg and he can only hobble so fast, even half-carried by Tim, so the position is left to Martin.

“I can’t see anything ahead but more tunnel,” Octavia’s voice comes from the dark. She might actually be even further ahead than Martin as she’s been crawling along the walls and ceiling rather than ride on Jon, but unless she’s illuminated in the cone of light his phone torch provides, she blends into the darkness. 

“I can’t see anything at all,” Marisha grouses.

Evangeline stays quiet, bringing up the rear. To compensate for getting underfoot earlier, she’s been giving Martin so wide a berth that he can feel tension thrumming along their bond with each step, but he’s scared and tired and anxious and if he’s not eaten by worms or turned into a hive, he’ll still be stuck in an endless maze of tunnels. What’s a bit of tension with his daemon as well?

Martin thinks he hears Evangeline say something and turns to look and though he sees the shadowed shapes of Jon and Tim, behind them all he can see is the gleam of silver, squelching, wriggling silver.

“Run!” At least Tim and Jon can hear his voice over the din. 

Martin takes off, running like he did all those months ago when he first gave his statement, keeping his arms out in front of him for unexpected corners or walls. His heart is pounding wildly in his ears, but it’s not loud enough to drown out the squelch of thousands of thousands of worms behind him. 

They must catch him at some point, but they aren’t burrowing towards his brain like all the nurses at Whittington Hospital. No, the pain is in his chest, like someone’s got a hold of his heart and is trying to pry it straight out his body. Martin falls, hard, and everything goes black.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And you all thought Jon was the only one with a traumatic daemon settling!  
> Chloe is a St. Bernard daemon, obviously. Chloe is a Greek name, like Evangeline, and though it's used pretty frequently now, it would have been a much more unusual name when Martin's dad was born which would have been late 50s-ish. I don't really picture Martin's dad being of Greek descedant, it's just that most of the daemon's names in HDM are Greek or Latin, so I stuck with that while first picking names.  
> Klemens is a Canadian goose. Klemens is the Polish variant of Clement, which seemed like a solid, old fashioned enough name for a daemon.  
> Happy Halloween! I've had computer problems the couples day so I didn't make my Wednesday posting, but I should be back to schedule next week. Thanks for reading! I'm on tumblr at [suchakidder](https://suchakidder.tumblr.com/)


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Couple things before reading:  
> I don't know where I got this idea, but I had always thought it was canon that Jurgen moved the tunnels during the Prentiss attack and that's why Martin got split up from Jon and Tim. So while the characters wouldn't know what was happening at the end of last chapter, we would know from canon. But thats not the case because my brain made up that tidbit. So sorry for any confusion. The tunnels moving causes Martin to be drastically separated from the rest, which leads to:
> 
> The bond between a human and their daemon can be physically severed, whether by physical devices that cut the bond (the plot of the first trilogy), or physically getting too far away from your daemon, either on purpose, or accidentally. If you and your daemon survive (because typically, when the entities aren't at play, you cannot physically live if your daemon dies and vice versa) the separation can never be reversed, which can alter your relationship with your daemon from as minimally as you two retain the same emotional bond but you now no longer have to physically near each other, to as drastically as you've essentially been given a lobotomy
> 
> Finally, there's a bit of... loss of will to live at the beginning. I wouldn't call it suicide ideation, but, separated from Evangeline, Martin doesn't want to continue on without her, so you can skip the first two paragraphs if that would be triggering.

For the longest time, Martin is alone in the darkness. It shouldn’t be impossible; even if he can’t see Evangeline, can’t see anything but unrelenting darkness, he should at least be able to hear her, even if its just her breath. Martin almost hopes he’s just lost his hearing, but he can hear each of his own ragged breaths and when he manages to push past the pain and call out her name, he hears each pitiful syllable. There is no problem with any of his senses— he can feel the chill of the air and the hard stone under his palms and legs, can taste the sweat that’s dotted his upper lip, and if he could find his phone and get a light, he’s sure he’d see the same dark tunnels. The problem is not him, the problem is he is alone. No Jon and Tim, no worms, no Evangeline.

Over time, the pain in his chest lessens, but so does everything else, like that line between what is Martin Blackwood and what is the darkness has begun to blur. He can feel it all— warmth, strength, feeling— leaching off of him, and Martin is quite content to let it. He doesn’t want to be if Evangeline is not. Whether she’s been eaten by worms or swallowed up by the darkness, or is just gone, Martin plans to follow. 

Eventually, he hears something else beside his own breath. A whisper, so soft it’s nearly a vibration. His name.

Jane Prentiss had had a telepathic connection with her daemon. It’s not impossible or unheard of; the Worldwide Daemon Organization estimates at least 10% of non-settled daemons have the ability, though that number reduces to less than 1% in adults. Usually, it’s a process as gradual as growing up. For Jane, it had happened in one fell swoop as Rian settled. 

“Can you imagine that loss?” 

It hadn’t been until he’d listened to that statement, that Martin realized just how much the statement giver inhabited Jon as he read them. It might have been Jon’s posh accent and voice, but it was Jane speaking.

“To go from one being to two? Can you imagine that silence?”

The wasps, the worms, the _hive_ , had whispered to her, filling the void in her mind Rian had left in his wake, and they’d promised her a way to never be silent again. 

Martin had laid awake on his couch in document storage that night, wondering if he’d known that when Jane had first attacked, would things have been different? She’d never spoken to him through the door, but if he had known what the hive meant for her, would that knocking have been enough to plant the seed? When Martin had looked down at Evangeline, stretched out against him on the couch, nearly as long as him from splayed back legs to her head, nestled under Martin’s chin, her wide chest moving up and down with each breath, all he could think about was he much he wanted — still wants, if he’s being honest— her to settle as a mouse, to keep her small and protected and hidden away from the dangers of the world.

“Daemons aren’t meant to be on the outside.”

Martin does not want to be a colony for worms or anything, even mice, but he does not want to be alone. He hopes he’s strong enough to resist the song.

But the voice does not sing to him. It whispers his name, louder each time, and then abruptly falls silent. Martin would think it’s gone away, but he can still hear something, someone. He can hear movement, though in no discernible activity. It’s not feet on the ground or hands moving against skin or the buzz of a fly flitting around, it’s just movement. There’s the occasional graze of something against stone, just the lightest scratching that never lasts long. That noise, at least, is familiar.

Then, Martin hears a sigh, weary and exasperated and he knows, all at once, who’s calling out to him. With such a little body and none of the normal facial features to convey emotion and body language, Octavia has to use her words to emote, and could put even Jon’s most theatrical sighs and sounds to shame. 

“Martin, I know you’re not dead. I can feel you breathing.”

For the first time in who knows how long, Martin feels something, something like hope or wonder maybe, and it stings like sensation coming back to a numb body part. Or maybe it’s just that, Martin has been on his knees, folded over himself to curl in and keep himself as small as possible and when he shifts his head it all stings— neck, shoulders, fluttering heart.

“That’s a bit creepy, you know?”

“Don’t— ” and Martin instantly freezes, listening hard for worms or anything, but her voice is softer when it returns “— don’t move too much yet.”

“Okay?” Martin waits for the catch, the reveal she’s not actually there or something monstrous has happened to him in the dark. He doesn’t move, still hunched over. “Wait, where’s Jon?”

“Your phone is right next to your left hand,” she answers instead. “You can reach out and grab it, but don’t move anything else. And…”

“And?” There is a familiar rectangle at his left hand and Martin gets it in hand and has to stop the muscle memory from instantly flipping open the screen, waiting for Octavia’s warning.

“Don’t panic, all right?” 

“You know, that’s never a good...” Martin’s voice trails off as he opens his lock screen. It’s not as much illumination as his torch, but enough to see it’s not a dark tunnel ahead of him at all. He’s still got stone beneath his body, and to the left, past where his phone had been, is the stone wall maybe half a meter from him. But as for what should be in front and to the side… 

In front of his face, with only a few centimeters of clearance is thick silk, folded over itself so many times it’s an opaque canopy between Martin and the rest of the darkness. Careful not to disrupt it, Martin tips his head down and to the side away from the wall, and it's all white.

Tarantulas aren’t orb-weavers. Octavia’s webs don’t have the row after row of thin, fine silk, forming perfect structured hexagonal structures. Her webs look more like pulled cotton, the cobwebs what you’d expect a crotchety old widow to wack at with her broom when she finds one in her larder. Octavia doesn’t usually cover an area so thoroughly, and while there's an occasional gap that lets in the darkness, for the most part, stretching in a diagonal between the wall and the floor, is a thick, opaque web.

Martin knows he should be more scared. Whatever Jon wants to believe, Carlos Vittery was _not_ cocooned in that web post-mortem. Martin can only imagine him thrashing and fighting as that dreaded spider continued to weave the web around him, tighter and tighter as the silk began to cut off all means of escape, all means of control. But Martin doesn’t feel like he’s losing control, he just feels protected, safe. Is there a difference between entrapment and protection?

“Octavia?” Her name sounds odd in his mouth, like he’s said it over and over until it’s lost its original meaning, though Martin is acutely aware it's the first time he’s ever addressed her. 

“You weren’t moving and there were worms… I don’t know if it would work beyond more than a few at a time but… You can shove it away now.” 

“No, no, it’s alright. It’s— ”. The position is uncomfortable, Martin has to lift his head up if he doesn’t want to direct his words to his knees, so carefully, he shifts from his front to his back, lying out on his back and pulling his legs up so he doesn’t disrupt the far end of the web. He can look straight up at the cover of the web, likes a tent wall, and he shines his phone’s torch up to see the shadows. “Is Jon with you?”

Martin knows he would have heard Jon. The silence is so stark he hears every shift of the web as it moves in time with his breath. He cannot hear any presence besides Octavia's. And besides, why would Jon let her waste so much time constructing such a temporary protection for Martin of all people?

“I was at the front with you. Evangeline’s eyesight would have been the best, but I thought it’d be safer since I can move on the ceiling, away from the worms. But then they came from behind and we started running…” 

Martin catches Octavia in the light, on the other side of the web. Her legs move like fingers walking down the keys of a piano in rhythm as she moves back and forth over an area near his shins, closing in a gap.

“Then what happened?” Martin whispers, though he knows the answer. When he had been running, he’d only looked back once or twice, so sure, not just in the general nature of daemon bonds, but in Evangeline’s individual resolute obedience, that she’d be right behind him. He, they, must have run too far, taken a turn the others hadn’t seen. When it had been just Martin alone in the darkness, he had thought his solitude probably had meant the worms had gotten to them, had eaten through Jon and Tim and their daemons and Evangeline and whatever allowed the wretched figures in from the statements to exists without daemons is what kept him alive. Octavia is proof that at the very least, Jon has to be alive, and there’s a more likely, though still devastating, explanation.

“I could _feel_ them. Jon and Tim and Marisha and Evangeline and all the worms, I didn’t even need to see them. But then suddenly, I couldn’t feel anything but you. The tunnel was just… empty.”

“Do you feel anything now? Anything besides us?”

“No.”

“We must have left them behind somewhere. Took a turn or… It’s not the worst, it’s just…” Martin doesn’t want to say the word. Statistically, if he’s made it this far, he’s beat the odds already. At least 50% of accidental daemon separations end in death, an estimate that’s staggeringly modest. Separation is tragic but barely more so than any sudden traumatic accident; it’s not the stuff of the statements they look into, full of horror and dark powers. There’s nothing for Martin to fear, but Martin feels his chest prickle and wall of web seems closer than it had been just a second ago. He casts his light around, but can’t see Octavia’s shadow anywhere. 

“Octavia? Are you still there?” Martin asks, his voice wavering. “Maybe you could come in? It’s getting kinda… weird just talking to dark.”

Martin sees the web begin to shift and then two pedipalps cut through a section next to Martin’s elbow. Octavia follows through, quickly closing the hole she made, then positioning her body to face him. Even though Martin pulls his right arm in closer to his chest, it’s a tight fit and he can feel her hair brushing up against his sleeve.

“Is there a game plan?” He asks.

“I wasn’t sure you would actually ever wake up. I was half convinced I was building a shelter for a corpse,” Octavia huffs. Up this close, Martin can see she’s not solid black, but there’s a thin layer of white in her hair, almost like the silver threading through Jon’s hair. But where Jon’s hair is otherwise a dark brown, Octavia’s is pure black, like velvet or inky darkness of a moonless night. 

“It wouldn’t have been the worst way to go.”

Without irises, Octavia can’t really express that she’s rolling her eyes, but Martin can hear it plainly in her scoff.

“Really. I thought I was going to die of starvation, trapped in my flat by a woman who hadn’t even really threatened me, just knocked menacingly at me. And I thought I would never see another living creature but Evangeline and no one would even know or care.” 

Octavia, it seems, like her human, has the ability to keep Martin talking long past the time he should stop. 

“Not that I’m glad you got… that you’re here and Jon’s not, I mean. I would have preferred it no had got split up and we weren’t running from bloody worms and— “

“I know.”

They decide to leave soon after; Martin phone battery is still half-full, but it’s been nearly an hour and a half since Tim burst through the wall of document storage, and the safety Octavia’s web offers them is less secure than that room had been, and much less likely to be found. They head the direction Octavia thinks they came from, but it’s hard to tell as shining the torch down either direction offers the same view of straight stone corridors before the light drops off. 

As they begin to walk, Martin spares one last look behind him, at the thick web Octavia had spun for him, even more impressive now that he can see the whole of it, even with the rift Martin caused by exiting. 

Octavia crawls along the wall to Martin’s right, spinning a single strand of silk behind her, like Theseus in Minos’s labyrinth, guiding them to the right path if they ever got turned around, but they never do, walking deeper and deeper into the tunnels. The halls eventually meet up with others, or turn, but they never double back. Every door knob they come across gets a try, but most knobs don’t even turn in Martin’s hand, and most that do reveal nothing but solid wall behind the door. The small few that open to small chambers look self-contained; only one clearly leads to a new hallway. When running from the worms, Martin knows he hadn’t opened any doors, but he keeps hoping he’ll open one to outside or to any building really. He’d take a creepy basement over the endless grey stone halls. 

At first there are worms every few minutes, but in small numbers that one or two sprays of the extinguisher — recovered just a few meters from where Martin had fallen — easily takes care of. The further they go, the less worms they see and Octavia even points out an empty wine bottle.

“Should we turn back?” Martin asks. 

This section of tunnel is narrower and short enough Martin can reach his hand up and easily brush the ceiling. 

“I think…” Octavia makes a sound like a content sigh and Martin swings around, expecting to see the burst of gold dust, but instead the beam of the light catches Octavia in descent, slowed from plummeting by the strand of silk still connected to her. She lands softly on her back, legs upright and twitching.

“It is Jon?” Martin has time to ask before there’s a piercing shriek that vibrates in the air. Octavia starts to moan and Martin can’t think about it, he scoops her up in his palm. He doesn’t hold her long, just enough to get her off the ground and slip her into his pocket, but he can still feel her presence in his hand like a sting, even as he starts to run. 

Following the white streak Octavia left at about eye level, Martin runs back down the hall until he reaches a crossroads and takes the hallway they hadn’t. There’s a door almost immediately to his right that wrenches open when Martin tries it, and he has to yank his foot back before he steps on a tape. 

Martin can’t help the scream when he sees. It’s obviously Gertrude Robinson, even if her body’s past identification now. Who else would it be, found dead under the institute, sat in a chair surrounded by overflowing boxes of cassette tapes? The mundanity of it— she’s just sitting there, like she could have been in the middle of filing— is more terrifying than if she’d been in some morbid pose. There are three holes, not the small holes Martin had picked worms out of his and Jon’s skin earlier, three bullet holes in her chest.

Martin screams again and doesn’t stop until he’s being hailed out of a trap door.

The Archives are as they were when Martin last saw them— overrun— but the worms are dead and it’s workers in hazmat suits teeming throughout the place. 

The closest worker to Martin tries to offer him oxygen from one of the tanks grouped at the trap door, but Martin bats the mask away. 

“There’s a dead body. I found— “

But the workers don’t seem to care, they’re more interested in getting him to medical— “please calm down, it’s all right love,” “they’re waiting for you in medical, Mr. Blackwood, they’ll get you sorted”— or to at least sit down, but Martin has no time for that. There’s a suited worker that might be Elias behind the hazy mask, but Martin pushes past them and their daemons.

Jon’s voice is audible even before Martin clears the last shelf of the Archives, loud and exasperated and telling some poor soul, a paramedic if Martin has to guess, that “--I would hope the education requirements for someone tasked with other’s lives would include some basic language comprehension— “ and Martin picks up the pace, if that’s even possible. There’s a moment of panic when he reaches a hand down to his pocket and feels it empty, but a flash of black catches his eye and he looks to find Octavia crawling along the shelves, outpacing him.

Martin is expecting to see Jon and the paramedics and the mess of the worm invasion when he finally gets to the workspace and that’s what he gets. Jon is sat in a spare office chair past all the assistants’ desks, scowl apparent even through the oxygen mask one of the two paramedics by his side has fitted over the bottom half of his face. One paramedic is rifling through a kit place they’ve placed on Tim’s desk and one is stood by Jon, but both of their daemons, a dark brown marmoset and grey and white spotted ferret, are tending to a large daemon on the floor, covered mostly in a weighted blanket. Martin doesn’t know why the sight stops in his tracks, has him unable to take another step or even open his mouth until he hears it, hears _her_.

There hadn’t been much personal hope as he and Octavia traveled the tunnels. Martin had found Octavia and he would find Jon, but he had never pictured it one step further, that Jon might have found Evangeline. That sort of luck never really extended to Martin.

Martin is aware he’s moving until he’s at her side, kneeling at her side.

“Hi,” Evangeline says, with a bashful duck of her head. Her paws move under the blankets, like when she’s caught in a dream she’s trying to outrun, but she keeps to herself and looks up at Martin with careful brown eyes. Tears streak down his face, but Martin doesn’t realize it till a moment later, once he’s thrown himself across her and buried his face in her fur. 

Too soon, though Martin can’t tell if it had been only a second or as long as he’d laid in the darkness waiting to die, he makes himself pull back. There’s things he has to say to her, to Jon, to Octavia, and things to be done. 

Martin stands up and finds Jon is actually _right_ there, not in his chair at all but at Evangeline’s side, so close to them that if he reached his hand down, he would brush the top of Evangeline’s head and for a moment, Martin thinks it would be quite lovely if he did.

But Jon lifts his hand instead, the one that’s not clutching Octavia to his heart, and touches Martin’s hair very carefully.

That’s very lovely as well, and probably not deserved, not the way Jon is looking at him so fond and relieved.

“You’ve got— ” Jon’s hand comes away with a tuft of white silk on his fingers.

That’s when a paramedic clears their throat.

Later, Jon is standing in front of Martin again, and this time Martin looks him up and down and asks, “Is that my jumper?”

Martin has had an exceedingly long afternoon, full of health screenings and examinations and one terrifying questioning from the police and his only thought — aside from how much he wants to curl up in bed with Evangeline and not get out until it’s all over— had been how he was going to explain it all to Jon. 

The discovery of Gertrude’s body should have come from him, but Martin had only realized he hadn’t told Jon until he’d been sat down with the police and by that point— at least an hour since Jon had been brought to the daemon ward at St. Thomas— Jon must have already known. 

PC Basira Hussain, a slight woman wearing a deep purple hijab and a serious expression, excused Evangeline from having to answer with questions with her with daemon, an equally serious scops owl with feathers that looked like aspen bark, and started in on Martin with the questions he expected.

Questions that were just a _bit_ hard to answer, as he had been blindly fumbling through corridors he hadn’t known existed earlier that day and was suffering from the the effects of daemon separation and an attempt of consumption via worms, so no he didn’t know how or where he found Gertrude’s body. Halfway through explaining Octavia’s guiding silk— for the second time— Martin had realized the line of her questioning and sat to attention so suddenly it dislodged Evangeline’s head from his lap.

“Are you suggesting I purposefully separated Octavia from Jon?” His voice had jumped nearly an octave.

PC Hussain didn’t waver from her steady, blank look. “You did arrive back into the building with Mr. Sims’ daemon in your possession.”

“Possession? She— I — she’s not an object!”

It’s classic cop procedure to imply facts from other’s statements that aren’t there; Jon wouldn’t have even had time to make a statement as the police had arrived at the Archives after Jon had already been wheeled off. PC Hussain didn’t have anything, but that didn’t mean Martin didn’t need to talk to Jon as soon as possible.

So, even as it was half nine before the doctors and aides had finally satisfied enough of their duties — and curiosity— to leave Martin alone for the night, he had gotten up, fully prepared to find Jon’s room and face the consequences, but when he swung open the door to his room, Jon had been standing on the other side.

Martin still in the clothes he started the day in, dusty from the tunnels and a bit stale from being one of only a handful of outfits he had at the Institute but not gone foul yet, but Jon’s outfit was already covered in blood before the tunnels. The paramedic that stayed behind with Martin told him both Jon and Tim had been unconscious when they arrived. With dozens of submerged worms each, even dead, the paramedics hadn’t been too careful trying to save any clothes as they got them both into hospital gowns.

Somewhere, Jon’s traded his gown for a makeshift outfit— dark green scrub bottoms, rolled over a dozen times to match his height and stay up on his hips, and a St. Thomas tshirt— and Martin’s cardigan. It’s large on Martin, and on Jon it’s nearly hanging down to his knees. It’s old, one of the last keepsakes of his wardrobe circa his first days at the Institute when he had really leaned hard on the librarian chic. The fabric is thin and soft and in an ombre that started soft yellow at his collar before transitioning to rusted orange at the hem. The color had always clashed terribly with Martin’s own dark copper hair, and he wore it mostly when he was lounging around the house, but it looks good with Jon’s dark skin and hair.

“I— ” Jon looks down and tugs on a sleeve like he’s surprised to find he’s wearing it. “I asked Tim to bring me some things from the Archives, including something to wear. You’d have thought he’d bring my clothes, but… I can— “

“No, keep it. I just wasn’t expecting it. Uh, come in.” Martin opens the door wider and steps back to let Jon through. Octavia is clutched in his hand, but once they step further into the room, she scuttles down Jon’s body and over to the window on the far wall, Evangeline hurriedly following after her. 

Jon watches their daemons with a furrow in his brow.

“I’m so, so sorry,” Martin says.

Jon immediately turns his attention back to Martin, brow furrowed deeper, but it’s confusion, not any sort of anger that clouds his expression. “For? Getting separated from us? I could hardly think you’d want to leave us behind when— “

“It’s not that… I touched Octavia.”

Jon blinks a few times.

“I— I didn’t mean to, or I did but I didn’t _want_ to. She was having a fit or something and I didn’t want to leave her. But I swear, I wouldn’t have— “

“Oh, that.” Jon shrugs.

“‘Oh that’?” Martin tries very hard not to yell back.

Jon waves off his outrage and then, looking around the room and finding the couch occupied by Evangeline and Octavia, sits rather stiffly on the edge of Martin’s bed and beckons Martin to follow. 

“Octavia already told me that, I was trying to see if you meant another instance,” Jon says easily. “It’s alright Martin. If the roles had been reversed, I would have done the same. Well…” And then Jon looks down at himself, and to Evangeline, then back. “Tim and I would have managed.”

Evangeline laughs the hardest of them all. 

“Still,” Martin continues once they’ve quieted down. He hasn't quite joined Jon on his bed yet, hovering awkwardly beside, but his feet hurt and it’s been an awfully long day. Even sitting as far he can towards the head, their thighs touch a bit. “With all that happened today, knowing your daemon’s been touched without your consent can’t be _nice_. The PC asked if I, um, took her.”

Martin doesn’t miss the look that passes over Jon’s face, like he’s gotten a new puzzle to solve out. “Jon, they don’t have any information yet. It literally just happened. Well, not just happened, Gertrude’s been missing for over a year, but— “

“Yes, yes. I know.” But Jon is not deterred and he holds up the tape recorder Martin had, in fact noticed he brought in, but was hoping he wouldn’t mention. “I actually came to ask if you would give a statement.” 

Martin tells Jon all he knows, a version that is somehow longer than what he gave the police and Jon and Octavia leave soon after and Martin’s glad for it. 

Martin and Evangeline are not afforded the same rest they were that first night in document storage, the long, peaceful slumber needed after such an intense adrenaline rush. Twice he wakes up to a nurse checking his vitals, and then, while they don’t arrive with the sunrise, another nurse is wheeling in breakfast far too early for Martin’s tastes. 

The day is filled with all sorts of tests, some of them the standard medical examinations, but many more are tests Martin’s never seen that measure things he read about while doing daemon research with Jon, but never quite parsed. He catches glimpses of Jon and Octavia a few times; the ward is not very large and they are getting all the same tests dones after all, but they don’t have much time for more than pleasantries before being pulled to one direction or the other. Martin considers going to his room after supper, but falls asleep before any serious deliberation.

The average stay for an accidental daemon separation is one month. Jon lasts 11 days.

On the tenth night, Martin is in Jon’s room, working earnestly on a worksheet from his therapist— the same worksheet Jon had filled out within two minutes of “free time” — while Jon putters around, packing up the small collection of his belongings that’s formed in his room. Sasha had flat out refused, making her visits without any deliveries, but after some begging, Tim had finally brought Jon his laptop— “absolutely no statements. Martin you watch him!”— and some actual clothes, as well as a few other sundries, and Rosie’s sent them both bouquets from the institute.

Martin’s pretty sure Jon’s done some work, but there’s only so much he can access on his personal laptop, and Martin’s only had to make good on his threat to lock it in his room overnight twice now. Tim and Sasha will be returning back to work after the weekend, but Elias has made it clear he won’t allow either him or Jon back until cleared by a _approved_ therapist— “approved Jon, I’m not letting you find some online doctor who will rubber stamp anything you pass under him at the right price”— and the hospital doctor has told Martin it will be at least another fortnight. 

“The doctors really okayed you to leave?” Martin asks, not putting it past Jon to sneak out in the middle of the night.

Jon mumbles something about “voluntary admittance" while ruffling the sheets of his bed, looking for a sock. 

“I am perfectly able to ‘recover’ from home. You want to stay here?”

Martin has given it some thought. All those months in the Archives he’d thought he’d be safer there, but worms in numbers he couldn't have ever anticipated were forming right below where he slept every night. There’s no reason to think of his little closet sized space in document storage with any sort of fondness, but between that and the dingy flat in Stockwell… At least, in the daemon ward he has an actual bed that’s not too short for him. His lease is up at the end of August, so he might even be able to swing it that he stays until he can get into a new flat— Elias has already made it very clear the Institute will be footing the entire bill.

“I haven’t really had a chance to look for new flats and I can’t really see myself back in my flat in Stockwell. My lease is up soon so— “

“I have a guest bedroom,” Jon interjects. It’s dropped as casually as the invitation to move into document storage, like Jon’s already decided for him and has begun to plan. 

“I mean, I couldn’t really, I don’t even know if the doctors will let me go so soon,” Martin manages to get out and that is the end of that, he thinks.

The next morning, he does mention it, circling around the concept for a while before he’s able to get what he really means. There’s no way Doctor David will go for it, but he’s more than happy to work with it and signs a release form that Martin can use at any time. Martin’s sure Jon’s forgotten the invitation, but after their daily sessions are done, Jon is at his door, duffel bag over one shoulder and the vase of flowers in the other hand.

“Are you coming?”

Martin looks back to Evangeline. Even with a severed bond, he could never lose the ability to read her expression and she is so carefully hopeful, sitting on her tail to resist the urge to wag it, with a smile on her face she can’t quite suppress. 

The worms that drove them out of their home in the first place may be gone, but there’s so much else still there, and Martin is so tired of being alone.

“Yes.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, that's it. Definitely not the end of the story, but the end of this particular fic. Thank you soooo much for everyone who followed along, I hope to see you all for part two (no title picked out yet, I am literally doing this all by the seat of my pants, it's wonderful)
> 
> If you're wondering about Jon's thoughts the whole thing, or thinking they both got off too light with their daemon separation, you're in luck. Part two will bring all the angst and Jon's POV. Part of the reason this chapter took so long was I wanted to make sure I got his parts correct when he interacted with Martin, and so I wrote it all from his POV meaning chapter 1 is nearly already done. I'm gonna try to keep to my weekly Wednesday schedule.
> 
> Plus, spoiler: there may be a TimSasha oneshot in this universe up later this week!


End file.
